


Meanwhile, Back At The…

by Guede



Series: An Epic Beacon Hills Drama [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire (Teen Wolf), Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, BAMF Melissa McCall, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Morality, F/M, Family Secrets, Human Hale Family, Laura Hale Lives, M/M, Mother-Son Relationship, Mystery, Pack Dynamics, Past Domestic Violence, Polyamory Negotiations, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Slow Build Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, The Hale Family (Teen Wolf) Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-05-30 19:01:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19409434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Then again, she thinks as she climbs out of bed and promptly almost falls on her face from a twist of bedsheet trying to follow her, she knows it’s not the healing.  It’s just them all being so damn tired and not getting abreath, and for that she’d have better luck just letting Stiles brew her coffee.  Honestly, if they weren’t already trying to kill people, she’d want to kill someone.Melissa McCall is in Beacon Hills, she's a werewolf, and she isnottaking anybody's shit at the moment.7/10/19:“Oh, don’t even try,” Talia says the moment she walks into the room.  “Don’t give me your werewolf bullshit right now when you all ran off to the hospital andleft Peter alone.”“What did he do?” Chris asks.“What did he—” Talia comes so close to lunging that Melissa’s got her claws out when the other woman pulls back “—what didhedo?  What did he do when he’s gone and I can’t get hold of him and all I have is a voicemail of himnot sounding like him and saying he’s going out of town?  What did you do, you useless moonstruck jackasses?”





	1. Chapter 1

Fuck my life, Melissa thinks, rolling over. Her elbow runs into something soft and then John hiccups a sleepy snarl. Then a second, less sleepy one, as she drags herself across the top of him and crawls to the bedside table, only to—

The phone rings again and Melissa blinks at the empty table, the world blearing in and out but never quite focusing. Then she stops trying to see and just lets her hearing guide her around till she’s scooped the phone off the floor and twisted back onto the bed, ignoring John’s choked-off grunt and then attempted flop over her knees. She pokes at the screen and then puts it against her ear.

It’s the hospital. Melissa tosses the phone aside and lets her arms fall back, squinting at the ceiling.

“Kid?” John mumbles, from somewhere around her left calf.

She nods. Drops one hand over her face and presses down on its heel, trying to muster up the sheer…she takes a deep breath. Moves her arm away, opens her eyes wide enough to properly focus, and then sits up.

“Goddamn it.” John’s sprawled out on his belly, head half-buried in a fold in the sheets. He still has a fading shadow across his back and dipping onto his buttock where he got caught by a wild swipe the other night. “’m get it, you got the last one.”

That makes Melissa frown and think she needs to check their wolfsbane stock and make sure it hasn’t gone bad. He hadn’t been bleeding when they’d collapsed into bed last night, so he shouldn’t be taking that long to heal up. “You can’t get this one,” she mutters, trying to rake her hair back into something reasonable. “You’re the sheriff now. You show up again and they’re going to start wondering why nobody’s actually getting arrested.”

Then again, she thinks as she climbs out of bed and promptly almost falls on her face from a twist of bedsheet trying to follow her, she knows it’s not the healing. It’s just them all being so damn tired and not getting a _breath_ , and for that she’d have better luck just letting Stiles brew her coffee. Honestly, if they weren’t already trying to kill people, she’d want to kill someone.

“Shit. Right,” John mutters. “Okay, so…”

“Just get up and get dressed, would you? Scott took the car today so I need a ride,” Melissa mutters.

As she heads into the bathroom, she catches John giving her a look. Turns her shoulder to it, because he’s the one whose idea about the old runoff tunnels had kept them out all night in the preserve, but once she’s gotten under the water and has rinsed some of the exhaustion out of her eyes, she sighs. She’s frustrated and it’s not really John’s fault; he’s trying just as hard as she is and he _has_ been getting further at the station, combing old records and pumping the more senior officers for their memories. It’s not on him that somebody clearly _got_ to the hospital’s archives before she did, or that it’s increasingly obvious neither the Argent family nor the Hale family seem to have any clue about it.

Melissa rinses out her hair and wrings it into a tail that hangs over her shoulder, then turns off the water. She’s halfway out of the stall before she hears a slight crackle and realizes she hasn’t gotten all the suds out; she sighs and steps back in.

By the time she makes it to the kitchen, John’s scrambled some eggs and left her a plate, and is in the living room. On the phone with Stiles, from the way he’s pinching at his nose. “Son, you can’t just—because it’s called a capital _felony_ —because I can’t fix the scene if the scene is in the middle of the goddamn town! Listen, I know you’re upset but you can’t give that to Blackwood, you know that. You know that.”

Stiles is vigorously trying to explain that he totally knows and he’s not giving an inch and his well-thought-out plan to do whatever. Melissa doesn’t pay that much attention since just from John’s tone, she can tell they have another five to ten minutes before Stiles confesses what _really_ went wrong, so she just picks up her plate and moves it to over by the sink. She digs into the murky soapy water that fills up the left half, shoveling eggs into her mouth with her other hand, and pulls out the bra she’d left to soak the night before.

“No, Jordan. No. No, I know you like Tara better but _I_ like Tara. I like her in one piece and not facing a civil lawsuit for shooting the wrong person,” John says sharply. Then he exhales the way he does whenever Stiles has shut up and it’s not because Stiles is thinking it over. “Damn it. Stiles…”

Stains are out, and Melissa starts to drape it over the sinkhead, thinking at least one thing got salvaged, and then she notices the kink in the right cup’s underwire. She checks it with her fingers, walking them along the curve, then knocks the bra back into the water with a disgusted sigh. And then, shaking her head, she fishes it back out and squeezes the excess drips from it and rehangs it over the sinkhead. She doesn’t have enough bras as it is, and isn’t likely to be able to get down to the mall any time soon. That kind of kink never is going to fit right, even if she tries to flatten it out, but she’s just going to have to put up with it.

“All right, all right, yeah, I just have to drop Melissa off at work and then I’ll—I know. I know, believe me, and when you catch up with him, I’ll be there to hold his legs,” John says, coming back into the kitchen. His voice drops slightly as he pauses to let Melissa get to the table before him. “You just have to keep him moving, Stiles. Don’t engage, just don’t let him rest. That was your plan at the beginning, remember? And I didn’t actually think it’d work, but it is. So don’t get so worked up, all right? You’re doing good.”

That makes Stiles feel better, but he doesn’t believe his father. And John doesn’t believe the cheerful way his son signs off for a second. Once he hangs up, he drops into the chair across from Melissa and drops his head into his hands. Massages his temples for a second, then looks up at her.

“Scott is swearing to me that he won’t let Stiles leave school early again,” Melissa says, looking at her phone.

John drops one hand against the table. “Funny, since I could hear construction in the background with Stiles and you know that’s happening two miles away.”

“Well, what he says is, ‘Mom, I promise I won’t let him skip out without an excuse,’” Melissa says, rereading the text. “So Stiles came up with an excuse for them. Or maybe they didn’t even make it to school today, which makes me wonder why you worked so hard to keep that suspension from happening. Would explain why he didn’t want to take his bike.”

The other hand drops. “I think I should call him off the Hales,” John mutters, slouching back and staring at the table. “We’re pretty sure they don’t actually know anything, and even if Peter’s still got the records, trying to get at them through him isn’t doing anything except teaching Stiles how to get better at setting people up. Which I know Scott doesn’t need.”

“You also know that Scott can say yes and no and if he’s with Stiles, it’s because he thinks he needs to be there,” Melissa says.

She’s too sharp again. She knows it, and doesn’t cover for it so much as lean into it, getting up and bumping her chair back under the table with her hip. As she carries her plate back to the sink, she can feel John’s eyes on her.

“At least the Argents aren’t actually trigger-happy,” he finally says. “When I brought up vigilante justice, Chris looked at me like I was insane.”

“That’s _Chris_ ,” Melissa snorts. “You should try Victoria sometime.”

“As a matter of fact, she asked to come by this evening, two hours after Talia and Peter are coming in,” John says.

Melissa washes her plate off in the empty side of the sink, then thinks to pull the plug on the other side. She shakes the drops of water off her fingers, watching the pinkish swirl drop lower and lower. “I think you should leave Stiles to deal with Talia and Peter.”

The sink drains out except for a brownish scum that sticks around the sides. She scrubs it down, squeezes out the sponge, and then goes back into the bedroom to make sure she didn’t leave any odd stains or bits of clothing anywhere. She knows Stiles will get it whenever he gets home next, but that’s kind of the thing—and since stepping into the interim sheriff role, John might have deputies or people from the prosecutor’s office over and he’s never going to keep track of that sort of thing. For someone with his sense of smell, he can be oblivious to an awful lot of trash.

Not that he’s oblivious, period. “You know, just because Peter’s a cocky shit and Talia patronized you over dinner doesn’t mean they’re terrible people,” John says as they walk into the garage. “At least, not so terrible that they deserve to have my son sicced on them.”

She looks at him.

“Yeah, they annoy me too, but I think I get it less because they’re still clearly trying to figure out if I’ve looked up Derek or not,” John says, shrugging. He gets the door for her, ignoring her eye-roll, and then tips his head slightly, looking at something ankle-level.

Her skirt’s caught on the door. This is not really the outfit she’d wear to work—or what she’d wear for hiking around concrete tunnels—but her jeans had been too ruined after last night’s fighting and the skirt had been all she could find at John’s place. She sighs and starts to reach for it, except John drops to one knee and gets there first. Flicks the snag free with two fingers, letting the fabric float as his hand smoothly continues up her shin. And then, as she twists around, he catches the instep of her foot before she can push it against his shoulder.

“Melissa. Do you honestly think the Hales are going to keep Stiles busy enough to keep him off Blackwood?” John says. “They think a zero-interest loan for tactical armor’s going to get me to arrest the Argents.” 

She stops because she thought he knew her better than that. “That wasn’t what I was saying, I was saying that you let him deal with them and then Scott can worry about whether Stiles is being too rough instead of—”

Her breath twists against her teeth and John’s hands stop just above her knees. He’s looking at her, eyes slightly more than half-lidded, knowing but not obviously plotting, because he does know her and he’s annoying. “You think they’re going to get themselves up against Blackwood if Scott doesn’t have somebody to fuss over?” he says, while his fingertips draw slow, looping circles across her thighs. “Stiles was right, and he’s making eyes at that Hale kid too? Not the Argent girl?”

“I don’t know if he’s making eyes or if he’s just getting that confused with feeling sorry that they don’t know what’s going on,” Melissa says, not quite gritting her teeth. She should just kick him.

He’s okay with it if she does, says the way John hunkers down, still holding eye-contact, till his nose is drifting level with the hem of her skirt. “Both of them? Seriously?”

“My son wants to save everybody,” Melissa says, sucking her breath. “So much that he thinks if he just cares hard enough, they’ll live. If he just falls in _love_ , he won’t—damn it, John, if you’re just going to tease—”

Shrugging, he dips his head into her skirt. She doesn’t have any underwear, he knows that, knows that and has been thinking about it since they rolled out of bed, like the damn alpha he is. That’s the way his mouth arrows in on her, anyway, not wasting time, tongue in her, lips rubbing her clit, nudging it into the front of his teeth. She snarls at him, lifting her hands just before her claws come out, and he rumbles low in his throat back at her, sending lights dancing in her vision.

It’s fast and hard and by the time she pulls herself back up on the seat, she’s loose enough that she nearly tips out of the car, misjudging how far to swing. She grabs and John’s bicep is in her hand at the same time that his hand lands on her shoulder, and then she goes with it and pulls him down, locking her arm around his neck as she kisses him. He starts, clearly thinking he was going to get away with his scheme without consequences—him and his son, one and the same, Melissa thinks—and then adjusts himself. Then again, shoving them back enough to get a knee on the seat as she pushes her hand into his pants.

“I’m running out of uniforms,” he mutters when they’re done. Not that he goes back inside; he comes around to the driver’s side and once seated, pulls his unzipped fly apart to clean up with the tissues she hands him. “Anyway, I’m not going to tell you how to raise Scott any more than you tell me what to do with Stiles, but I’m just saying he’s pretty direct. The tricks don’t work on him. That’s why Stiles likes him so much.”

“So that’s not telling me,” Melissa says dryly.

John shrugs again, though he’s eyeing her a little. She lets him, and checks email as he pulls the car out of the garage and takes her to the hospital.

* * *

It’s a short drive. Not really worth the gas, honestly, but if she walked to the hospital at the hours she ends up working, people would wonder more than they already do. Beacon Hills might be considered a safe town, but that’s because everybody tends to live the schedule you’re supposed to, and to close out the people who don’t.

In that sense, Melissa should find the Hales more along her lines than the rest of the town. And it’s not that she is siding with the majority, who somehow can’t just see past what is morals-baiting acting so stagey that Stiles, age five, looks like a classically-trained actor in comparison. It’s that the rest of the town doesn’t constantly get her dragged into meetings with the hospital administration.

Based on where she’d left things two days ago, it should have been a light day, and they’ve been careful to just get rid of the bodies completely rather than have to work up cover stories—they need that energy for the detective work—but the moment she walks in, she’s got back-to-back talks with everyone from the forensics techs to accounting to _legal_ , all wanting to know about some damn donation she had no idea had been coming in. Up until she walks into her morgue and sees the bright, shiny new machine under its plastic wrap and understands exactly what the Hales are trying to do.

“I’m so sorry,” Laura says when she slinks into Melissa’s office, holding out a cup of coffee as if it’s either a shield or a limb she doesn’t mind sacrificing. “Mom just gets…overenthusiastic? But she means well, really.”

“Mmmhmm,” Melissa says, taking the coffee and taking a good, long gulp of it as she regards the machines. In her head, she knows that the coffee won’t do anything for her until she gets a chance to slip in some powdered wolfsbane, but her one year as a trainee nurse prior to being bitten had already solidified certain reflexes in her body: give her a cup of joe and it automatically tries to perk up.

Laura fiddles with a button on her white coat. She smells like the long-term care ward, the oncology part of it, but not of any part above the second floor, so she interrupted her rounds to come find Melissa. “I can talk to her if you find it offensive or something. I think she just—”

“Oh, no, God forbid,” Melissa says, pulling her mouth into a weary—but not too weary; regular people can’t pick up on smell and pulse but they’re still pretty good at bullshit—smile as she turns to Laura. “These’ll do a lot of good for a lot of people, and I’m not so proud as to make a big deal out of it.”

The wave of relief rolling off Laura almost swamps out the coffee aroma. “Oh, good. Because Mom just—it’s just this town, you know?” Laura says. She tucks a stray piece of hair back into her bun, looking back at the hall, and then sidles a step closer to Melissa. “It doesn’t matter that my mom’s helped fund half the businesses here, or that Peter has fended off so many state inquiries into City Hall, or that they _both_ actually just…want to do their thing, and live a nice life and make sure me and my siblings get to grow up, people just still say we’re a bunch of murderers. It’s like our own little urban legend these days, how many bodies do we have buried in our basement?”

One, Melissa thinks. John’s betting on a couple more but she thinks that’s just because he buys Talia Hale’s whole femme fatale persona. He needs to get his head out of Stiles’ compulsive theorizing. “I’ve been in your basement.”

“I know! I know, and a lot of other people have, because it’s not like we’re actually recluses and we do invite people over, unlike the Argents who just only ever have their ‘relatives’ from out of town and—okay. Okay, I promised myself I’d stop getting sucked into that.” Laura drops her head into her hand for a moment, muttering to herself, and then lifts it. She looks hopeful. “Anyway, so…”

“So no, I’m not going to call your mother or write a note or anything telling her she can take them back because this is a silly way to deal with accusing me of being obsessed with her brother,” Melissa says patiently, sipping more coffee. “It _is_ silly, though.”

“I know. I know, and I’m really sorry about her and Peter being so snotty with you. And _really_ sorry about Peter asking all those questions about your old cases. I mean, if you want to talk about being obsessed,” Laura says. Then grimaces. “Not that he is, he just—when he thinks somebody’s trying to dig up dirt against us, he gets—”

“Laura. _Laura_.” Melissa puts the coffee down and looks at her. “Laura. It’s fine. It’s fine, all right? I get it, I get having families who just _do_ that to you without even thinking.”

She’s so desperate to break the pattern and get out of town, she wants to believe Melissa. It’s obvious just from the way she’s hanging onto every word, and yet…there’s that second before she smiles back. Even when she wants Melissa to feed her a line, she doesn’t take it right away. Something or somebody trained that into her.

“Thank you so much,” Laura says quietly. “I just…never even get the chance to try and explain this nonsense to people, so thank you.”

Somehow Melissa doesn’t really think it was Peter or Talia, though she’s sure they’ve tried. Neither of them seem like the type to have left that last little bit of wistfulness in Laura’s voice, like she owes Melissa the thanks. “No problem. Just…”

Laura pauses on her way to the door. Not quite bracing herself, but it could go that way.

“A little help when Finance comes around to figure out how we work this into the balance sheet,” Melissa says.

“Oh, God, that’s the _easy_ part,” Laura snorts, her shoulders dropping. “I mean, if Mom doesn’t already have that wrapped up and they just haven’t checked their inboxes for it, because they can’t do that when they can just come down and yell about, omigod, more assets that they can amortize anyway, and…yeah, I’ll help. Don’t worry about that. I’ll stop in on them on my lunch break.”

“Thanks,” Melissa calls after the retreating woman. She makes as if to go to her computer, but just pauses there till Laura’s far enough away, and then she goes to the door and shuts it. Wait a second, and then turns around.

Her son slinks out from behind the second machine, shoulders set at a sheepish slant, utterly failing at looking three inches shorter than he really is. He offers her a smile.

“You smell like scent-masker,” Melissa sighs, coming over and hugging him. Then pauses, frowning. He twitches and she rolls her eyes and tugs him closer, ruffling his hair till sand shakes out. “And if you’re trying to convince me you and Stiles weren’t hanging around that golf course, spying on Blackwood’s hotel, then you’re chasing the wrong—”

“We honestly didn’t mean to, Mom,” Scott says earnestly. “We were just coming back like we’d said, but then we picked up the scent, and it’s on the way to the Argents’ house, and I just really don’t like the way they keep poking around there.”

Melissa pushes her son back and looks him in the eye. He flushes, dips his head and then lifts it back up and meets her gaze head-on. Which kills her first take on it. She presses her lips together, trying to pull her thoughts in order, and then shifts her hands up to cup around his face.

“Baby,” she says. “Baby, you know your father never would have cared if this set of Argents knew what their people up in Washington had been doing or not.”

Direct hit. Which, since she’s his mom, makes her wince inside, feeling how every muscle in Scott tenses up. “I know he wouldn’t have,” Scott says, a rare edge to his voice. Then he flinches back. Puts his hand up to his face and then drops it and looks regretfully at her. “I’m sorry, I’m not—I’m not trying to talk back to you.”

“I know you aren’t. And I know you aren’t him either,” Melissa says softly. She rubs her hands up and down his neck a couple times, then presses lightly with their heels, the way she used to when he was younger to keep her scent strong on him. “But that’s exactly why you need to back off. At this rate, you’re going to end up turning them into bait, and if they’re really as clueless at they seem, that’s the worst thing you can do. They’re going to get dragged into it and have no idea how to defend themselves, and you know we have to be careful.”

Scott pales a little, then tries to drop back. It sends a stab through her, but she holds right onto him till he stops that and nods. “I know. Sorry, I guess we just got…got carried away. It’s just—it’s just we were really getting somewhere and then Blackwood showed up, and we had to put everything on hold. And I don’t want this to turn into all the other times where we just had to let him go, Mom. I know you’re tired—I’m tired of this, and if I am, I can’t even imagine how bad it is for you.”

“Well, baby, I’ve been dealing with it for so long that I think I’ve forgotten how not to,” Melissa says, smiling at him.

This time he’s the one who grabs her, when she starts to turn back to her desk. “Mom,” Scott says urgently. Flushes when she stops, as if he actually thought she wouldn’t, but keeps hold of her shoulder. “Mom. I’m serious. This has to stop.”

“That’s the idea,” Melissa says, and then suppresses a sigh as her son keeps searching her face. She shouldn’t feel so damn _annoyed_ , not with what Scott’s trying to talk about, but she just…she has so much else to do. And she _is_ used to it. “Scott, it will. I promised you that a long time ago, and I meant it. If you think I’m going to let you waste your whole life trying to fix what your father did, then you’re going to have to figure out another way to avoid college.”

Startled, Scott huffs a laugh. It’s genuine, it’s too spontaneous to not be, but at the same time, it doesn’t reach all of his eyes. “I know, Mom. And I think this is it, you know. I think this is where we’re going to figure it out. So I just get a little exc—I just can’t wait. Not that I want to rush into a fight, but—”

“I know what you mean.” Melissa reaches back and squeezes his shoulder, looking up at him. Tall and strong and somehow, despite everything, still giving a damn. “But we’re not going to figure it out on a golf course, of all things. So just leave that part to John and I, and _go to school._ ”

“It’s lunch period, Mom, and seniors do get to go off-campus,” Scott says, but he’s not really trying.

Rolling her eyes, Melissa gives him a push and then lets him go. She makes a shooing motion and he laughs and backs out towards the door. His eyes flick to the side and then he’s gone.

Melissa stands there for a second. Then crosses the room and shuts the door for the second time, and stops with her hand still on the knob. “Stiles, I swear to God—”

“It honestly, truly wasn’t even my idea,” Stiles says. When she turns around, he’s sitting on the edge of her desk, heels kicking against it. She gives him a look and he twitches and hops off, then bends down to give the desk front a scruffing with his cuff. “Really. I mean, so okay, it was my idea to take that route home because the radio chatter said Dad was doing something over on the south side, and he wasn’t texting me back so—”

“Just because John doesn’t reply within thirty seconds doesn’t mean you need to go see what he’s doing,” Melissa says.

Stiles raises his hand and opens his mouth. She looks at him and he grimaces and puts his hand down. He still wants to bring up his point, she can tell from the way he’s jiggling his leg, but he must have gotten some sleep because he does, in fact, resist the urge. “Anyway, I told him no but he’s really stuck on Allison and he’s been kind of twitchy since she and Derek Hale showed up in the preserve.”

“And whose idea was that?” Melissa says.

“Wh—it wasn’t mine either!” Stiles says, eyes widening with outrage. “I’ve been telling him he can do better for weeks!”

“Stiles,” Melissa says.

He makes an annoyed ‘what’ jerk with his shoulders. She folds her arms across her chest—doesn’t show fang, doesn’t let her eyes change color, because if you really know what you’re doing, you don’t need that window-dressing—and gradually he falls back. Starts to think about it, and then makes a face, ducking his head and running one hand over it.

“Okay. So I might have…suggested the best no-death way to get to the bottom of the Argents was to just get over to their house and see if they had hunter paraphernalia lying around,” Stiles says, looking everywhere in the room but her. “And Scott might have taken that seriously, instead of just me mouthing off—”

“You spun out three different trust-gaining scenarios,” Melissa points out. “I was in that conversation.”

Stiles sighs heavily. “And none of them were going to be doable just on time-allocation grounds, because God, but Peter Hale’s social calendar is exhausting, considering he’s supposed to be committing crazy homicidal incest with his sister and is therefore of the shunned type, but okay, point taken. I should not rely on Scott’s ability to reason out what is truly important to me.”

There’s something else going on with that, says the sharp little way his voice turns back on itself. “Is it just a crush?” she asks.

“Allison?” Stiles says, blinking. Then he shrugs. “Well, unless Scott’s really taken _my_ advice to heart lately, and is actually playing her…look, anyway, I’ll deal with it. Allison doesn’t seem to be biting anyway—I mentioned she’s hanging out with Derek Hale, right?”

“So am I supposed to add that to my list of worries?” Melissa sighs.

“What? No,” Stiles says, clearly not thinking in his rush to shut that door. But he never can help himself, and in his own way, he’s just as bad a liar as Scott it. “I mean. Scott’s not the pistols-at-dawn type, obviously. And as far as I can tell, Derek just ends fights, he doesn’t really start them, the unshaven Hollywood killer look aside.”

Still doesn’t sound like the greatest combination to Melissa, and frankly, Stiles might be a sharp observer but his interpersonal-relationship skills are nowhere near as advanced as his cynicism. Which should be John’s headache, but…Melissa takes a step towards Stiles. Who freezes, then deliberately relaxes himself, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“You know he gets too involved in these things,” Melissa says.

For a second Stiles looks like he’s just going to roll his eyes, and then the dipped head turns into a sag. “I know,” he mutters, that sarcastic persona of his crumpling. He’s reluctant about letting her pat his shoulder, but not because he wants to push her away. “I know, I’ve been telling him. They’re not worth it, they’re never worth it. We’re just going to leave when we’re done anyway, and we’re pretty close. Dad and I really think so—I know it took forever to figure out that nobody still alive here actually _knows_ , but that actually makes it easier, right? We can just dig up what we need, handle it, and they’re never going to really know what happened.”

“That’s the idea,” Melissa says. She leans in, letting her arm go over his shoulder and giving him a half-hug, and then steps back. Looks right at him. “If you can just _keep them out of it_. You and Scott need to stick to that.”

“I’m on it,” Stiles promises her. “Trust me. When have I ever taken my eye off Scott? Have I ever?”

“All right, all right,” Melissa says. “Now out. I have work to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Melissa is a werewolf, and did raise Scott on her own, and I love her a lot and she's going to be less than perfect here, because when you do your best to raise your kids to survive on their own (and the world is truly trying to kill them), things don't always go right. So if you detect some emotional manipulation there with stressed-out teenage boys, you're not wrong.
> 
> Also, aside from trying to build a more plausible Scott, I want a world with female werewolves who actually get interior lives and backstories and character arcs.


	2. Chapter 2

Stiles has, in fact, looked after Scott since they first met, and doubting that is not why, as soon as Melissa gets a spare moment, she calls John and tells him their kids were in her office instead of school. She does it precisely because she does believe Stiles is going to look after her son, and John’s got a whole police force and she has two lab techs and an admin she shares with two other departments, so he can deal with it. Also, she’s got a year of autopsy backfiles waiting for her on her computer, and she is at least going to start reviewing them today, come hell or high water.

She doesn’t even get to click on them.

“And you thought letting Blackwood invade our rental was a good idea,” she says flatly, just a few hours later, to the two boys sitting in her office, _again_.

Stiles lifts his hand.

“Wait, no, you thought this was a good idea, because of course he was just going to stumble into whatever trap you set for him and I’d come home and you’d all be sitting in the living room, just wrapping up his intervention and he’d be ready to come to the light,” Melissa goes on, unable to keep her anger out of her voice. She’s near-shifting, she can feel the way her muscles are trying to twist under her skin, and the door isn’t shut all the way. She should care. She doesn’t. “Because _that’s how it works_.”

“Mom—” Scott starts.

“I don’t want to hear it. Not a—Stiles, not one _damned_ word,” Melissa snaps. She should also care that he shrinks back from her—Stiles stands up to everybody, would poke the devil himself in the eye on the way down—but again, she doesn’t. “You ignored everything that I said and John said and you—not only that, they saw! Don’t tell me they didn’t, Scott.”

“We’ve got blackmail,” Stiles says quickly. “Honestly, I think that part’s okay. They don’t know anything about Scott’s dad but they clearly have their own bodies to hide, so I don’t think they’re going to look too close.”

Melissa rolls her eyes and it is not because she’s one bit happier about things. “That’s not the point. The point is—” both of them glance down, whitening, and she has to breathe and make herself sit back, and take her hands off the slight dents she’s just made in her desk “—the point is, now Blackwood thinks they’re involved. Allison and Derek, he thinks they are, so we have to worry about them, and their families are out there _right_ now giving John a piece of their mind and—”

“Hey, listen, Scott didn’t ask either of them to come over,” Stiles protests. “They just showed up.”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Melissa grates out.

He falls silent, eyes so wide they’re nearly all whites. His hands are wrapped around the edges of his seat and she can see the metal bar lining it is starting to warp, and next to him, Scott is very still and very straight, staring right back at Melissa.

“Why,” she finally says. “Why, when we’re so—just, _why_? Why would you even _think_ that this would help?”

Fortunately for him, Stiles finally stops trying to swoop in for Scott and just looks down at the floor. It’s killing him, and he can’t keep from glancing constantly over and she knows he’s hoping for Scott to just give him the signal, invite him in to help out, but her son…is her son, and doesn’t do that. Her son just keeps looking straight at Melissa.

“Mom, Deucalion blames Dad for setting him up, but Allison’s grandfather is the one who actually blinded him. And he thinks the Hales helped Dad disappear,” Scott says. He’s trembling in his seat, but his voice is steady. When she starts to give him her usual answer to that, that what his father did isn’t his problem, he raises his voice to keep going. “We know they don’t know any of that, but he isn’t going to believe that. You know that. He’s already been in town for three days and he’s never somewhere more than a week before people start dying. We have to stop him before he does something.”

“Well, that might be true, but that still doesn’t mean you should be taking risks like that. And honestly, neither of these families actually seem that defenseless to me,” Melissa says sharply. “It’s not your job to protect them, Scott. We’re here for one thing and for one thing only: to track your father down. Do you understand me?”

Scott frowns. “But—”

“But nothing. I don’t want to hear any more about it. You are going to stay in this room till I come back, and then I want you to go straight to Stiles’ place and then you’re going to _stay_ there, till John and I are sure we can handle things with Allison and Derek’s parents,” Melissa snaps, getting up from her desk. “This is a pack, Scott. You don’t get to decide by yourself what to do.”

“I wasn’t trying to do that,” her son says, flinching. “I just—I know using the house was a bad—”

“The whole idea of putting Blackwood’s threats first is a bad idea,” Melissa says, stalking around the desk. She senses Scott turning and moving, trying to get her attention, but she refuses to look over. She’s so _angry_ sometimes with him, she can’t even believe herself. She’s a good mother, or at least she likes to think so, and how she can have so much feeling boil up about someone she loves…she needs to go out. She can’t look at him right now. “Putting anything before finding your father is—no. I don’t care if you like that girl, she’s not—”

“It’s not about liking her or not liking her, Mom, it’s about the fact that she and her family don’t know anything, and neither does Derek’s family, and it’s not their _fault_ that we’re even here—”

“And I thought _you_ knew better,” Melissa says, twisting sharply.

Stiles flinches in surprise, glancing over at Scott, who looks utterly shocked that he’s not taking the blame this time. Of course, then Scott firms up his shoulders and gets that expression on his face, and Stiles immediately jumps in. Even swings his arm in front of the other boy. “I totally underestimated Blackwood’s taste for—” he twitches as Scott starts to say something, then raises his voice, enough so that Melissa can hear the pleading note “—I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s too late for that,” Melissa snaps. She goes to the door and puts her hand on the knob. “Stay. _Put_.”

The response she gets back isn’t so much a word as a whine, a faltering exhale drawn roughly between the teeth that flicks claws into her heart and then drags them through. And it is unfair and unmotherly, what she’s just done. John gets wind of it and he’s not going to waste any time calling her out on pulling the same tricks on their kids that they shun other werewolves for. He’s going to remind her that the whole point was to be different, to change the way things worked.

But she doesn’t hesitate when she leaves the room. She knows all of that, and she knows too that if a guilt trip on Stiles is the only way to keep her son out of danger tonight, she’d do it again, without hesitation. She’s the mother—if she has to be what she hates in order to let Scott have his dreams of being better, then that’s her job.

* * *

John has one of his deputies drive Stiles and Scott home, so once Melissa sees them out of the parking lot, she makes herself put them out of her mind. She has other things to handle.

They don’t actually include the Hales or the Argents, which is on purpose and which isn’t just because she hates John or wants to make his life as miserable as possible. It’s for good strong strategic reasons: except for their pack, nobody knows that Stiles was involved in the whole debacle that ended with Allison Argent in the ER, so John doesn’t have an obvious conflict of interest to keep him out of it.

Since her son and her rental was involved, Melissa does, and so Melissa makes shaky appearances with both the hospital admin and the prosecutor’s office to get her excused from the matter, and then promptly sets about looking into it. She sends both of her techs out to the house to take samples, mostly to get them out of the way, and then uses John’s login to get into the police database and start rearranging the patrols so they’ll funnel any werewolves out tonight towards a decent location. He’s going to kill her for _that_ too, but he’s the sheriff and he’s got his hands full with angry parents. It’s not like he’s going to have the time to take off and just deal with Blackwood’s little gang and come back so he can make his meeting with the prosecutor in the morning.

After that’s set, Melissa makes a trip down to the pharmacy, where she has to spend nearly an hour chatting up the staff, not so much so they’ll leave her near the nearly-expired stock as because Talia Hale comes looking for her. Melissa doesn’t want to deal with that—the woman might not know the supernatural, but she knows something, and worse, she thinks that’s all her family needs to lord it over people—and texts Laura to get her mother out of there. Which then means another hour of sitting in a breakroom with Laura and listening to her alternate between apologizing and fretting about her brother and repeatedly almost-dropping hints about what’s got Derek back from college, as if Stiles hasn’t already figured that out.

Some days, Melissa thinks as she finally makes it back to her office, she just doesn’t understand what she cared about before she was bitten. And then she realizes the room’s occupied.

“We realize it’s very late, Melissa, but we just thought it was important to talk to you about our daughter,” Victoria Argent says, beating her husband to her feet. She has her hands clasped in front of her and an appropriately concerned expression on her face, but smells of nothing but irritation layered over resentment over anger. “Given what happened today.”

“I have no idea what was going through Allison’s head,” Chris breaks in. He doesn’t seem to notice the way Victoria’s needling the side of his face with her eyes, and smells much more genuinely worried, though there’s still a rough edge to it. “She’s not the kind of person who gets mixed up in this kind of thing.”

Melissa stops in the doorway, leaning against the hand she still has on the knob, and thinks about whether she can just burst into tears and claim she’s not up for this. Probably not, she’s left it too long. “Look, I don’t want to…say anything before the investigation’s done,” she finally goes with, pairing that with a neutral expression. “I’m not sure what to think, and I’ve been working in forensics long enough to not bet on assumptions.”

“Well, that’s very mature of you,” Victoria says after a moment, in a way that makes it clear she doesn’t really approve of that approach. “But I don’t think we can just sit here and let it go, not as good parents.”

This time Chris gives her a look. Word around town is they’re a happy enough couple, close-mouthed and defensive as they are, but something’s definitely eating at them besides their daughter. “We’re going to deal with Allison—she needs to know right from wrong,” Chris says to Melissa. “But we just—so we can make that clear to her, we wanted to see if you had any idea why she was at your house.”

“I assume it was because of my son,” Melissa says. She turns away as she does, giving the door a little push so it swings open instead of shut and then picking up her workbag from where it’s sitting nearby, but she keeps tabs on both of their heartbeats. “Your daughter seems to have a thing for him.”

“She absolutely does not,” Victoria snaps. “Allison would never be attracted to a boy who—”

Melissa looks back up, slinging her bag’s strap over one shoulder as she does. 

Victoria doesn’t actually falter; it’s her husband who cuts her off, forcefully enough that she stops, lips pressed together. “She’s got crushes, we know. She’s in that—that stage, unfortunately. Trying to pick ones who will get our backs up, just because she disagrees with me or her mother about something,” Chris says, a little awkwardly. “But this just seems much more extreme than what she usually does, so we wanted to know if she and Scott have…”

“Have what?” Melissa says, starting to lose patience. “Had sex?”

This honestly hadn’t occurred to either Chris or Victoria, and they are both horrified, says their blanked-out faces. Whether it’s horror because of the mere concept of teenagers banging, or horror because Melissa beat them to the obvious, or…then again, Melissa doesn’t really care. She’s going to be late to her throwdown and after the month she’s had, she could use a good knockdown drag-out mauling.

“Look, how about you talk to your daughter, and I’ll talk to my son, and we’ll just keep them apart till the police get back to us. All right?” she says. Then leans against the jamb, jingling her office keys in her pocket till the pair of them come out of the room.

Not that that’s the end of it. “I think it would be more helpful if we knew why your _son_ ,” Victoria all but spits at Melissa. “Allison’s a good girl. Even when she’s—testing us—she doesn’t get mixed up in this sort of—”

“Listen, your ‘good girl’ was in my house, without permission, while both Scott and I were out,” Melissa snaps back. “You should be lucky I’m going to wait and see and not just press charges immediately, and put her graduation on hold.”

Mistake. Chris had been about to pull Victoria down the hall, his arm already hooked tightly around her own, but now he turns and steps up right next to her. They’re both taller than Melissa, even in her work heels, and move with the kind of economy that signals people who spend a fair amount of time outdoors, with a specific purpose in mind. “Is that a threat?” he says, looking down at her.

But then, even if Melissa’s temper is getting the better of her, she did not survive the disintegration of her original pack, her ex’s lunacy, and the death of Claudia Stilinski to roll over for just anyone. Even for the sake of cover.

“I think that’s up to you, Chris,” Melissa says. She jerks the door shut, listening for the click, and then locks up. Then reshoulders her bag and looks from his face to Victoria’s. “I’m sorry that your daughter’s arm got cut up. I hope it heals just fine, and doesn’t get in the way of any of her sports—she’s really good at archery, I heard. But if you think you’re going to lay this on my son’s head, then you’re as dumb as she is, playing detective with that Hale kid in my house in the middle of the day.”

And then she turns on her heel and walks away. Outraged noises start up immediately, but they stay by the door, and when she gets to the elevator without someone running up behind her, she figures she’s clear for at least twenty-four hours. Maybe longer, if she can get John to lend one of the deputies to run interference.

At any rate, Melissa writes off the Argents and hurries down to the parking lot. It’s way past shift change and all of the remaining cars are clustered up within sightlines of the entrance, leaving her to walk alone around the back of the hospital to the farthest lot, which butts right up against the preserve. Trees hang over the pavement and it’s not uncommon to see deer or chipmunks skittering along the edge of the lot, at least in the daytime.

At night it’s a bare, dim, empty square and the only view of it from the hospital is from the side that’s taken up with most of the utility equipment. That suits Melissa just fine; she’s already taken off her earrings and blouse by the time she gets to the car, and once she’s got her bag in the backseat, she leans her hip against the door to swap her shoes.

It’s when she’s bending over for the second one that she notices the other car in the lot. Way on the other side, almost into the next lot over, and parked oddly—she has to stare at it for a second before she figures out that that’s not really supposed to be a spot. It’s just a gap left over from when they destroyed the curb to expand the lot, which isn’t quite big enough to be a real slot for a car. But somebody jammed an SUV into it anyway.

Which makes sense when she spots the two figures walking towards it: Chris and Victoria Argent. Melissa bites back a curse and hastily crawls into her car, pulling the door carefully shut after her. Then stays curled up on her back, her legs cramped up against the dashboard, as she tries to shimmy out of her skirt.

“Something is wrong with that entire family,” Victoria’s saying to Chris. “I never thought I’d say this, but whatever they’re up to, I think it’s probably worse than what the Hales are involved in.”

“I don’t think going to the FBI is a good idea,” Chris is muttering, almost at the same time. He sounds irritated, and like he’s trying not to; this argument is at least a few minutes old. “I think we should just go home and get Allison’s things, and when we come back, let’s try to talk to her and find out what she thought she was doing.”

Victoria lets out a hard little cough. “Are you—are you honestly saying that? You _know_ what she thinks she’s doing. This is just more of her trying to make a point to us, thinking she knows better because that Hale girl’s—”

“I don’t.” Then Chris stops. Takes a deep breath, over the jingle of keys. “I don’t think,” he says more deliberately, less pointedly, “It’s so much to do with the Hales. Not this time. I know Derek was there, but—”

“Exactly!” Victoria snaps.

“Would you just hear me out for a second?” Chris says, his tone back to annoyed. “I _am_ worried, all right? All right? Our daughter is in the _hospital_ , and with all the—I can’t help but focus on that.”

The damned skirt gets stuck on something under Melissa. She twists, then catches herself right before her knee would have rammed into the wheel. Then slides one arm down and pushes up on it and wiggles, and thank God, the skirt starts to move again. She kicks it into the corner and then twists down to get at her purse. At this point she’s thinking she’ll just leave the car in the lot, shift, and slide out the other side of the car. It’ll mean sacrificing another set of underwear, but if the time is what she thinks it is…damn, it’s two minutes later than that.

“I know. I wasn’t saying you don’t…I just hate that we’re in this position,” Victoria says suddenly, her voice soft and low in a way Melissa didn’t even think the woman was capable of. “We shouldn’t be the ones worrying about our reputation. You and I have worked so hard, Chris. So hard. Allison doesn’t even know.”

“Well, I was thinking…should she?” Chris asks after a second. He’s hesitant, but his reaction to her sharp inhale is to rush on. “She’s smart, Vic. I think she’s already got an idea, just from the news, and the—eavesdropping on when those FBI people came by. And I keep thinking it’s not working anymore. I know we talked about giving her a clean slate, keeping her out of it, but if she’s already got an idea, and if the way the Hales are involved are just giving her the _wrong_ idea about it—”

“They wouldn’t ‘just’ give her,” Victoria mutters.

“Look. I don’t like them either, but if we’re trying to get clear of what my father was up to, then we should stop letting them drive everything we do, too,” Chris says, trying to persuade as much as criticize. “And anyway, if we go to the FBI, you know we’re just going to reopen that entire can of worms. Talia’s way too connected to not start digging, and if she starts digging, then we really will be in trouble. Besides, I think just this once, she might agree with us about the McCalls. Did you see the way she kept needling Stilinski about using underage informers?”

Victoria snorts. “Well, I saw how he is _extremely_ well-prepared with excuses about why no one needs to be taken into custody, never mind there’s obviously a dangerous individual running around town who was only stopped by a _teenage boy_. Allegedly.”

In retrospect, Melissa thinks as she scoots to the other side of the car, maybe John should have stayed as a deputy. They’ve had to be a lot more obvious about the string-pulling in the past few weeks, and they’re not even close to done. Which is just all the more reason to deal with Blackwood and get him out of their hair, and then they can do more than just improvise around a bunch of bumbling—Melissa stops and listens very closely.

“Is that her car over there?” Chris suddenly says. He and Victoria stop talking, while Melissa curses savagely under the breath. “I thought she’d left for the night.”

“She certainly headed out as if she had something to run from,” is Victoria’s snippy addition.

The two of them walk across the lot at a slow but uninterrupted pace. Victoria’s been in her heels too long, Melissa can hear the slight limp, and Chris keeps fiddling with his car keys in his pocket. And beyond them, at the edges of the lot, another werewolf is slithering through the grass.

They’re too close now for her to open any of the doors and sneak out, and the other werewolf is moving to account for them. She thinks—dreams, to be honest—about letting them just die, and then she grits her teeth and eels into the backseat. Unsnaps her bra with her hand and then squirms out of her underwear, and drops them both on the floor just as Chris’ feet stop up by the driver’s side.

“Her bag’s in there,” Chris says. His tone is surprisingly hard to read, but his scent gives everything away: suspicious, nervous, worried. 

“Let me see,” Victoria says, walking around the front of the car. “That looks like her…her clothes?”

Pressed up against the door as tight as she can, Melissa rolls her eyes. She listens to the pair of them puzzle over things, easing her hand up to the door lever. Then Chris sucks his breath.

The streetlights, Melissa suddenly realizes. The lot does have them, and the way they’re shining into the car, it’s throwing her shadow across the backseat. From where he’s standing, Chris would be able to see that.

“I—” he starts, and then Victoria cries out.

Melissa throws open the door, rolling out onto one arm and twisting so that she can grab Chris by the elbow. He’d been looking across the car at Victoria, so she catches him completely off-guard, and by the time he realizes what’s going on, she has him stuffed halfway into the backseat. He gets his leg up—decent reflexes, kicking instead of trying to shake her off his arm, right up till he notices she’s naked and freezes—and she knocks it aside with her forearm, then seizes his shin and uses it to shove him the rest of the way in. Then slams the door and hops up onto the roof of the car in the same motion.

She’s shifted by the time she comes down on the other side, landing neatly on the hindquarters of the alpha ripping at Victoria’s dress. He lets out half a roar before her weight sends his jaw cracking against the pavement.

Melissa gives him an extra kick as she slides off of him so his body swings left, away from Victoria. The other woman’s fallen to one knee and is just pushing herself back up, bloody swatches stretching from the snarling alpha male to the scrapes on her hands and shins. She scrambles, looking wildly from the alpha to Melissa, and then, like an idiot, dives forward for her shoe.

All that work to push her out of the way and—Melissa wheels around and slashes out at the alpha, only to find he’s not there. She snorts back her displeased growl, then jerks away and just avoids the claws raking at her belly. One of her paws catches on the pavement—it’s freshly-redone, the asphalt soft and sticky and coming up with her toes—and she twists frantically over, then gets back up, trying to keep her head aimed at her opponent.

He’s not there—he’s on her left, fangs sinking into her shoulder as Melissa whips about and throws herself down onto her back, pushing out with all four paws to rip him off and send him flying across the lot. Half her shoulder rips off in the process, or so it feels—it’s not actually that bad, she knows that, but God, it hurts.

Melissa stumbles back, her balance off, and then shifts enough so that she can reach around and clutch at her shoulder. Clumps of matted fur squeeze out between her fingers and drop to the pavement, but she grits her teeth and puts up with it, spinning around and around to try and see where the alpha got off to. Her shoulder isn’t going to heal before their next clash, but if she can just get it to clot over—

The sound of shattering glass makes Melissa spin around. Victoria stares at her from the other side of the lot, high heel held squarely in the middle of a frame of jagged teeth. Then the other woman tosses the shoe down between them and reaches into the broken window. In a second she’s got it unlocked and has flipped herself behind it. She’s not quite inside the car, but instead is using the door almost like a shield as she fumbles with something further inside.

If Chris has their keys, then breaking a window to get inside isn’t going to do her much good. And her expression’s too focused for her to just be panicking, so what is she doing?

Just then, the other alpha comes crashing down from above. Snarling, Melissa tumbles out of the way just in time, but then she’s not upright when he bounds after her. She smashes her claws across his face, then kicks out with her hindlegs and gets a half-dozen scores up high on his thigh. That pisses him off good and he overdoes his grappling, letting her twist out from his grip and dance away. 

Not unscathed, she’s got blood dripping all over her left side now. He mock-lunges and she hops back a good six feet. His eyes brighten with triumph and he advances aggressively, head high as she keeps backing up. He is a big one, outweighing her by probably a good fifty pounds, and he moves like an experienced killer.

Melissa keeps backstepping towards the Argents’ car, pressing her paws deep into the asphalt, letting her claws drag up clumps of it. She lets her head sink low and the alpha male suddenly rears up, lips writhed back in an anticipatory grin.

Which is when Victoria shoots him. His head knocks sideways, turning his outraged roar into a muffled wet howl, and he falters. Goes back onto all fours, coughing and shaking, and then, predictably, his head snaps back around with a freshly-healed grin on it.

Victoria’s still behind the car door, one elbow braced against its top. She looks shocked, and then she thins her lips and aims lower and shoots the alpha in the legs as he gathers himself up for a leap. He jerks, roars, and she puts three shots in his lower hindleg in rapid succession.

After the third one, Melissa hears an extra _crack_ and she immediately presses forward, jumping up in the air and then smashing down on the alpha’s head and shoulders with her asphalt-reinforced paws. She smears it into his face as much as she can, using the contours of his jaws and the edges of the teeth snapping at her to clean off the gravel, and then she twists away. Shifts two-legged, punches him hard in the kidneys, and then skitters back as he tries to follow her.

His leg’s still trying to heal from the bullets. He springs at her, but lands lopsided and stumbles, and when he pushes himself back up, another bullet snaps the same leg out from under him. This time he falls onto his chest, growling. He writhes for a few seconds, then pushes himself up and looks at Melissa. Then back at Victoria, who isn’t shooting anymore.

Melissa looks at the gun and does some rapid backcounting, and then grimaces. Victoria must be running low and saving the couple bullets she has left; she can’t get back in the car for more without turning her back on the alpha. And Melissa could try to just drag it out till someone comes to see what the shooting was, but with her luck, the alpha probably took care of the on-campus security before coming out here.

“McCall,” the alpha says in a gravelly, angry voice. Only one of his eyes is working, the other too covered in blood and fur and asphalt to be seen.

A brilliant white light suddenly floods across the lot, whiting out the alpha till he’s just a sketchy outline caught mid-wince. Melissa glances over her shoulder, sees a pale-faced Chris sitting behind the wheel of her car, and then slams herself forward as quickly as she can. She rams the alpha before his good eye can adjust, beating his arm down and punching him in the throat. Then, as he’s choking and spasming, she grabs his jaw and puts her knee down on the back of his neck and yanks up, hard.

As soon as his spine breaks, Melissa’s off him and back on four feet. She’s triangulated to Victoria, still by the car with her gun not quite lowered, and Chris, who appears to have hacked her car enough to get it to creep forward a few feet. Then it stops and he sits there. He wipes his hand over his face, staring at Melissa, and then slowly reaches to the side. Opens the door and puts one foot out. “Victoria?”

“I’m fine,” Victoria says. “Broke a heel.”

“I saw that,” Chris says, still staring at Melissa. He raises his hand but seems to forget what he wants to do with it, letting it hang at an odd angle as his mouth works.

A tiny metallic grating noise catches Melissa’s attention, and then Victoria takes one hand off her gun and puts it against the car door instead. Her shaking fingers continue to tap against the metal. “Melissa?” she finally says.

Now she has to think about what to do with them, damn it. 

“Do you—” Chris glances at Victoria “—can she even understand when she’s like that, do you—”

Melissa just about keeps herself from snarling at them, and shakes herself, and stands up human. “Get out of my car and put that gun away if you don’t want me to get even more pissed off about this,” she says.

Chris and Victoria both started the second she began to shift, and when she’s done, Chris starts again, his arm coming up as if to shield his eyes. He stops that when she starts talking, glancing towards Victoria again, which nicely distracts her for when Melissa zips over and takes the gun from her. By the time she notices, gasping and stumbling backwards, Melissa’s already emptied the gun of its remaining bullets. 

The gun, Melissa tosses into the backseat of their car. The bullets she keeps as she lopes over to the alpha’s body. She heard the heart go but she’s still careful as she lifts the head and looks into the eyes and then sniffs it over for any giveaway scents.

Thankfully, he doesn’t come back alive. She decides he can probably wait to be decapitated and walks back to her car. Chris has gotten all the way out of it and he’s over with Victoria now, helping her up—she apparently fell when Melissa startled her—muttering about her injuries in a disjointed way, as if Melissa couldn’t already tell from the burning feeling on the side of her head where both of them are looking. 

She ignores them and drops the bullets into her purse, just in case they might come in handy later. Pauses and looks at the wires dangling under the steering wheel of her car, and for a second, regrets jumping in front of Victoria. 

Then she gets her phone out and calls John.

 _“Tara’s on the way to the hospital,”_ he says before she can say anything.

“How did you know?” she says, frowning.

John stops breathing for a second. _“She’s on her way because two different people messed with the patrol schedule tonight, so she went to cover the west end of the preserve and got chased back to her car by one of Blackwood’s,”_ he finally says, in that slow way he has when he’s sitting on a volcanic rage. _“I know you were the first one, and you could’ve just text—never mind. Where the hell are our kids, and where are you?”_

Two differ—Melissa swallows a growl. “Stiles put an alert on your computer again, and probably fed it to Scott,” she says. “I was going to deal with them by Blackwood’s hotel, but they caught up with me in the hospital back lot and there were gunshots. You need to send someone here.”

_“Like hell, I need to—”_

“You need to send someone here. And you need to run this, John. You’re the sheriff, you can’t just disappear,” Melissa snaps. “Run it and clear the decks for me. I’ll call you back when I’m done.”

The second after she hangs up on him, he calls her back. She dismisses the call and almost shoves her phone back in her purse, but another number just under his pops up on her list of recents: Braeden. No voicemail or text, when Melissa checks with a shaking hand. She hisses, yanking her head up and staring at the moon overhead, and for a second thinks about just letting the madness wash over her.

It’s all just so much self-perpetuating bullshit, she usually thinks. Hunters trying to psych werewolves into thinking they’re uncontrollable killers so they’ll kill so they’re fair game, and werewolves trying to psych hunters into thinking they’re the baddest around so keep indoors on full-moon nights. Reality is, you live long enough to grow into your skin and full moons don’t have any more hold on you than your own worst impulses. But sometimes she sees the attraction in worst impulses.

But, she tells herself, that’s not going to save her son from whatever’s going on. Melissa takes a deep breath, rolls her shoulders, and texts Stiles and Scott that she wants them to call her back right now.

 _Stiles called me an hour ago_ , Braeden immediately responds. _I’m covering him._

Her fingers slip as she types a reply. Autocorrect gets it and for a second that is the most annoying thing in the world to Melissa. Then she gets herself together and hits ‘send.’ _Why not Scott._

_Scott’s out cold, Stiles isn’t and they’ve got the two younger Hales with them. They’re leaving the golf course now, I have to stay and clean. Breakfast._

That’s Braeden signing off, and she won’t get back on no matter what Melissa does, so Melissa grits her teeth and puts her phone away. At least she knows her son is alive and healing—her stomach is churning anyway, but she knows Braeden wouldn’t put it that way if it was something she wasn’t sure Scott could recover from. But she can’t—the golf course is already over? So they must have moved up the timing when they took over her meeting, and—

“Melissa?”

Before she can help herself, she’s curling her upper lip back to show her fangs. Chris flinches and tightens his arm around his wife’s waist, and they both seem to have second thoughts about coming over. But then he takes a deep breath and helps Victoria limp a step closer.

“You can’t stand out here,” Chris says, hesitating after every other word. “Somebody must have heard the shots, they’ll come—”

“They are, I just called the police,” Melissa says. 

They both twitch again and for a moment, Melissa thinks Victoria is going to ask her whether she’s gone insane. But then Chris’ face clears up and he nods. “You…know John Stilinski, don’t you?”

He’s asking with that kind of leading tone that people use when they already know the answer, and think pretending they don’t is going to make you feel better. And anyway, they’re still alive, and Melissa knows what she’s going to do, even if she hasn’t talked herself into liking it. “He’s a werewolf too.”

“ _Werew_ —” Then Victoria clamps her mouth shut. She isn’t incredulous, exactly, but something is bothering her. And it’s obvious enough that when Chris looks at her and she sucks her breath and touches one of the still-raw scrapes on her arm, he almost asks her before catching himself and looking at Melissa. “So the police aren’t coming?”

“No, they are. We have to do something with that over there,” Melissa says, pointing at the body.

“I always thought they shifted back when they died,” Chris says, absently glancing over his shoulder. Then he catches Melissa’s eye and hunches a little, embarrassed. “In the movies, I mean.”

Melissa can’t help but make a face, even though she knows she thought the same thing once. “Not so easy on the morgue as that. Anyway—”

“Is this about my father-in-law and his bullshit up in Washington?” Victoria abruptly says. Chris tenses and Victoria leans into him, not like a woman who needs the support so much as one who’s counting on her weight to pin him down. She doesn’t take her eyes off of Melissa. “Gerard Argent? Did you know him? Is this about something he did?”

“What makes you think that?” Melissa manages, blinking.

“Well, aside from you saying that just now?” Victoria says. Under her strident voice and harsh stare, she’s completely terrified. Her purse is jumping every time Melissa looks at her. “It makes a lot more sense of some of the things he tried to send us. And of your son—”

“For the last time, your daughter’s the one who’s been following Scott around,” Melissa snaps, and from the way they both step back, she knows her eyes are red. She lets them stay that way—she’s angry, but she’s also thinking, about what they think they know and what they could know. And about the fact that she needs to get them out of this damn parking lot so she can go _find_ Scott. “Anyway, if you want to talk about—inside. We’re going inside, and then we’ll talk about your _daughter_.”

* * *

The Argents don’t so much as peep as Melissa sneaks them in through one of the service entrances and through a back hallway to her office. They aren’t any less shocked or comfortable with her, but they keep that to just their scent and the odd twitch, and do whatever she says. Honestly, they’re putting her nerves on edge, and she _already_ has had her only child knocked out from a fight she should have had herself.

“Just leave that,” Melissa mutters, coming back around the corner and finding Chris down on one knee trying to wipe up a blood splatter while Victoria rips off a clean piece of her skirt. “I’ll get it later. Come on.”

Chris looks up, presses his lips together, and then just gives his wife his arm. The two of them limp the rest of the way into her office and take the couch with relieved grimaces neither of them can really stop. Melissa drops her first-aid kit on the table in front of them, then goes to get the spare outfit she keeps in one of the filing cabinets. Then twists sharply back, remembering, and grabs the kit and digs through it, tossing out the stuff regular humans shouldn’t use.

“You should wrap that up,” Chris says.

She looks up. His eyes flick down, then snap back up and he flushes slightly.

“Here,” he says, picking up one of the gauze wraps.

“Thanks, but I’ve got my own. Use it for her,” Melissa says, pushing the box back towards them.

Her arm’s clotted up but it’s not a true scab, and the same goes for her other wounds. She’s still angry enough that she’s not really feeling it, but the longer she hangs around here, the more likely that’ll wear off before she can get everything she needs to get done, done. So she doesn’t take the packets of wolfsbane, but the epipen of Nine Herbs she also keeps in the kit. With that in hand and her spare outfit, she hunches down behind her desk and braces herself.

“Who was that?” Victoria suddenly says. “That—werewolf who tried to kill us? And is that what—did Allison see it? She wouldn’t talk about what happened and I don’t think it was just because she’s trying to protect that Hale boy, or—”

The slashes on Melissa’s back pull tight, then break as she crouches. “Your father-in-law was dealing to both sides of—” they’re new, she reminds herself “—there are werewolves and there are people who like to think they hunt werewolves. He was selling weapons to both sides.”

Victoria goes silent. Then suddenly stinks of alarm, as Chris lets out a sharp, forceful exhale—it’s not actually a curse. In fact, it’s completely wordless, but gets across the impression of swearing via sheer propulsion. Which is pretty impressive, considering Melissa’s noticed and she’s currently mostly trying not to keel over and smash her face against the carpet as the Nine Herbs burns through her system. 

“…knew it was insane, but I didn’t think he was _this_ insane,” Chris is muttering when Melissa can unclench her jaw again. His voice is muffled, probably because he’s got his hand or hands in the way. “He had to leave this kind of mess, he always left this kind of mess and now I can’t even beg Kate to tell me what the hell it is because they’re both _dead_ —”

“Begging her never did a bit of good anyway, she always was twisting it around to suit her,” Victoria is saying, half-arch, half-soothing. “Chris, we’ll deal with it. He _is_ dead, so at least he can’t do anything new. There can only be so much left.”

“You know, you don’t have to find out,” Melissa says. She sounds a little ragged, her voice rough from the screams she’d held back. She swallows experimentally, flexing her fingers and toes, and then decides she’s got enough coordination back that she won’t rip her clothes. “Burn everything he left, move, change your name.”

Quiet over by the couch. Then: “Are you serious?” says Chris.

Yes, of course she is, and so are the dozens of people she’s run into over the years who’ve tried exactly that. But Melissa has to stand up to get her sweats all the way on, and when she does, her head bobs past the top of the desk and she gets a glimpse of their faces. She pauses, then gives the drawstrings at the waist a tug and straightens up.

“Were you one of the people he sold to?” Victoria asks, very calmly.

The sports bra’s shrunk, Melissa realizes. It’s uncomfortable but it’s all she has, and she needs something to get her past the night nurses; she can unsnap it as soon as she gets back outside. Twenty minutes, tops, she promises herself. “No, and I’m not interested in killing you or your family. I have other people I need to deal with, like that guy out there,” Melissa says. “You, on the other hand, need to get serious about figuring out what Gerard was up to, if you’re going to have any chance. I got in the middle of that because I can’t have bodies right in front of my workplace, but I’m not here to be your bodyguard.”

“We weren’t going to ask you for that,” Chris says stiffly, as if it’s an injury to his pride that she’d even think she has to make that clear. He frowns, his eyes drifting to her hands as she bundles her hair back behind her tail—no, it’s her shoulder he’s trying to peer at, the one that’d been shredded. “Look, about your son—”

Melissa presses her lips together. Scott isn’t going to be happy, and then she shrugs that off; she’s not the mother she once dreamed of being, she knows that, but she will be a mother who keeps him alive. “The only reason he’s been trying to make friends with Allison is because I told him to. We didn’t know if you knew what Gerard was up to—if you had, we were going to try and recover some things from—my ex traded some things to Gerard that I want back. Since you don’t, he doesn’t need to keep trying.”

Chris and Victoria sit back at the same time. Victoria’s got her leg up on Chris’ lap, and he’s holding a half-unrolled roll of gauze to her knee, which he looks at while she shoots him a glance. “We had no idea. Chris hasn’t returned a call from that man since he kicked him out of our house, which was years and years ago,” Victoria finally says. “Allison was just finishing sixth grade, so that was—”

“If you don’t know anything about what he was doing, then I’m not interested,” Melissa says. She finishes tying off her hair and then puts her arms straight out in front of her. Sniffs a little, doesn’t smell fresh blood on cotton, so she thinks she’ll do. “Werewolves travel in packs. You need to stay in here for the night, till we’re sure they’re all accounted for. They won’t come into the hospital itself, there are too many people and even Deucalion’s not that—”

“Why wouldn’t you want to come after us?” Chris says. “If your ex—”

“If you don’t know, then you don’t know where Gerard was keeping them and that’s what I wanted to know,” Melissa says, crossing the room. “I’m pretty practical. Killing you isn’t going to make you know, and it’s just more bodies to hide.”

“Wait—hey, listen—” Goddamn it, Chris is actually coming after her, pushing off his wife’s legs and nearly tripping himself in the process. “That was—that fight—I’ve never seen anything like that, and—”

Melissa stops halfway out the door, concentrates on her expression, and then turns around. “I’ll be fine,” she says softly, craning her neck to show up how much taller he is. She even manages a convincing smile, from the way his scent dampens from frantic to just skeptical. “I just wasn’t expecting you to get in the way, Chris. It’s a lot easier to fight when I don’t have to worry about someone else getting hurt. So do me a favor, stay here? I’ll see if John can send a patrol car later.”

Chris is going to announce she is not fine and she needs to let him help, says the way that he’s drawing himself up. And then he hears the rest of what she says and he shuts his mouth hard enough for her to hear a small click of teeth. He doesn’t actually say she’s insulted him, and she can tell he’s arguing with himself about whether it’s okay to call her on that when she’s just killed somebody to protect him. Up close that stony face of his isn’t actually that much of a mask.

He finally just moves back. It might not be intentional, but it’s enough for Melissa to close the door in his face. She can hear him exclaim through the door, and then Victoria calling for him to let it go and come back, they’re obviously not going to get anywhere that way. Melissa does believe that they’re completely in the dark about Gerard’s doings, but their reactions are not even close to normal.

But that’s a mystery for when she has time. Melissa licks her fingertip and writes a few quick symbols around the doorknob, then heads back to the parking lot.

By the time she gets there, a police car is waiting for her. She stops for a second when the officer’s scent wafts her way, then picks up into a jog.

“He’s fucking _pissed_ , but Talia Hale showed up with her lawyer brother so he can’t leave,” Jordan says. He’s already got the limbs disjointed and is dusting each one with wolfsbane before setting it in the body bag next to him. “Also, really? You weren’t even going to leave a little Blackwood for me?”

“He broke into my house, Jordan,” Melissa says, going around him to her car. She pauses again, seeing the police tape wrapped around the handle, and then, grimacing, pulls the door open to get her purse. “And yes, I know it’s because Scott was trying to get him to do it. He’s a grown man, he should know better by now than to take dares from teenagers.”

Jordan has stopped and is watching her through narrowed eyes, his gloved hands resting on his knees. He doesn’t approve—he doesn’t really approve any time John hasn’t signed off on it—but he isn’t going to intervene.

“Both Argents saw, I’ve got them in my office,” Melissa says. “I think they might stick around for an hour or so, but I need them in there for the rest of the night. They’re also acting a little weird. Can you watch them?”

“You’re asking the guy who Gerard tried to suck into a goddamn bottle for instant war-genie action,” Jordan mutters, but he goes back to work, which means yes. Then he lifts his head again. “Isn’t their daughter still in the hospital? Why don’t you just get them to watch her?”

Melissa takes out her phone. “Can’t. Scott took my meeting with Deucalion because of that girl, and now I can’t drive my car because of Chris. Their car works and I’ve seen Allison driving it around town so I’m pretty sure she has a key to it.”

“Wait a second,” Jordan says sharply. Something scrapes and when Melissa looks over, he’s actually getting to his feet.

Why would he—then she spits a snarl at him. The faint reek of brimstone swirls into the air, but Jordan just keeps his temper to that. Judgmental asshole that he is, it’s the right odor. “So now Blackwood thinks either the Hales or the Argents _are_ important, so if he sent someone to the hospital, he’ll send someone if they leave the hospital. And based on what I’ve seen so far, if Allison gets hold of her parents, she’ll figure out a way to get them to leave. Right now I think they’re just shellshocked enough to stay for a little while, and if I can just—I need the time, Jordan. I just need the time to deal with this mess, and fast. I’m not going to kill her. Or let him kill her.”

“Yeah, I know, but I think there’s a better way to flush them out,” Jordan mutters.

“Well, what? What?” Melissa challenges him. She waits till he grimaces and looks away, and then keeps on staring till his head starts to drop. “My son nearly got himself killed, damn it. I’m not trying to get anyone else—she’s not even going to see a thing. But I need Blackwood’s pack out and I need them out now, so we can just find what we need and go. I wanted to do this slow too, but we just can’t at this point.”

“I just think—” Then Jordan pushes his leg back and gets down onto his knees again, shaking his head. “I’ll watch them, okay? Oh—”

Melissa’s already turning away. 

“—Braeden says Stiles took them to his house,” Jordan says.

Breathe in, then out. Take a step, then another. And then Melissa sets her shoulders, and puts her phone to her ear, and calls the nurse on Allison’s floor.

She’s going to use the girl. She knows that, even if Allison won’t. When she told Chris she wasn’t after his family, she was telling the truth, but the truth doesn’t mean she won’t use everything she has when her family is threatened. And right now, in this town, there is a pack who thought they could kill her son.

Anyway, Melissa tells herself, teenagers are strong. They haven’t seen a thing yet, so they can afford to be. “It’s Dr. McCall,” she says as the call’s picked up. “And it’s about Allison Argent’s parents. Can you put her on?”

* * *

Allison finishes up the night without seeing a thing, because as she drives back and forth across town, Melissa stalks the shadows in her wake. She and Jordan got the glass out of the Argent car and sopped up the most obvious stains, but there’s still more than enough to trail a thick, rich blood scent in its wake.

And it works. By the time Allison pulls into the driveway of Stiles and John’s rental, Melissa thinks she just might have gotten all of them—she _knows_ she got Blackwood—and thank God. She feels as if she’s been run over by a bus and then dragged down a gravel road, and if she puts her head down for a second, flattened under a hedge, then she thinks anyone should understand.

The rumble of a car engine wakes her back up, and then—she sniffs deep, fighting past the acrid burn of the exhaust, and then almost raises the hedge on her shoulders. The scratch of its twigs brings her back to herself, and she shifts human, watching Allison and Derek drive away with watering eyes.

Then she goes inside.

Scott’s heartbeat is upstairs. It skips and she stops, and it skips again, then speeds up. Then, a bare two seconds later, abruptly slows. She bites her lip, thinking about screaming for him, and about sitting down right where she is and letting her heart break.

And then she breathes. She’s his mother, and they’re werewolves, and they still don’t know where his father is. She knows the things she has to do in order to keep Scott’s life going. It’s not a long list.

Melissa goes towards the first-floor bathroom, but then about-faces and heads for the one in the basement when she gets a good whiff. The basement shower is barely that, just the hose spliced into a pipe and some cheap stick-on tiles down, with a bucket holding soap odds and ends, but it gets her clean. She has to cut some knots out of her hair that are too stuck together with dried blood that just won’t come out, and then she has to dig through the boxes to find a large dishtowel to dry herself off with.

When she comes back upstairs, some clothes are sitting at the top of the steps. She stops, then dresses herself and goes around the corner into the kitchen, where Scott is sitting at the table.

“You can’t get them involved, Mom,” Scott says immediately. “They don’t—they have no idea about werewolves. No idea.”

“They do now,” Melissa points out, watching her son’s expression harden and then crack. Somebody’s already been through this one with Scott.

Probably Stiles, from the way Scott’s mouth twists but his scent stays relatively free of anger. “We can’t teach them fast enough,” he says after a moment. “It was my fault they know, I know. I messed up, but I’m trying to fix it now. This whole thing with Deucalion—”

“It’s over,” Melissa says deliberately, taking a seat next to Scott.

She’s not expecting the way he slews around to stare at her, as if—then Scott crumples his face into his hand. He smells so tired and so sad, if she closed her eyes, she might think he was attending a funeral.

“Mom, you can’t just—you killed all of them?” he says, genuinely shocked.

“Well, I didn’t get Ennis or what’s his name, the snide one,” Melissa snaps. “I should have, but then you got Stiles to—”

“I didn’t get him to do it, I did it myself and when he realized I’d taken his password, he came after me! With Allison and Derek, because he thought I wouldn’t fight if they were there. He was trying to get me to _leave_ ,” Scott says, with real heat in his voice. “And I know that wasn’t a good idea and Stiles knows too, but you—you—was this what you were going to do? If I hadn’t changed things, was this just a set-up to kill them all anyway?”

Melissa stares at her son. This is the kind of argument she expects Stiles to make, trying to turn things around into an accusation. But not her son, who’s always been the first to try to understand, the first to forgive.

“You were. Mom, you c—” Before he can finish, Scott slumps back against his chair, running one hand over his face over and over again.

“I can’t what?” Melissa finally says. “I can’t deal with someone who’s been on our trail since Sacramento? I can’t—”

“Don’t make this into protecting us!” Scott says, his hand dropping so hard and fast that it makes an audible smacking sound as it hits his thigh. “You didn’t have to set up a challenge to do that, and we—we _talked_ about this, Mom, we talked about not—”

“He broke into our house. I wasn’t even the one challenging, Scott,” Melissa says through gritted teeth. She doesn’t understand why Scott is losing his temper, but if he is, then she has to keep hers and just find out what’s twisted him up this time. “I was just picking the time and place. And given he made it clear he has no problem going after these people you seem to care about—”

Scott flushes and ducks his head, and for a second Melissa thinks she might have changed the conversation. But then he looks right back up at her, and the embarrassment’s gone from his eyes. “Don’t make this about that either, Mom. I’m not talking about me. I’m trying to talk about you.”

“Well—well, what about me? What is the matter with you?” Melissa says, unable to help the snap in her voice. “Yes, we had a plan, but you can’t stick with the plan when other people are making moves. You have to adapt. I adapted.”

“That is what I mean,” Scott says, sounding frustrated. His voice cracks and he jerks his head to the side, spitting out a breath, and then inhales sharply. “You’re not—you’re not the—this isn’t you, Mom. We’re so, so close to actually finding him and putting an end to all of this, but you’re so—you’re so angry all the time now. You don’t wait to talk to us anymore, you just go do…and I know I should have talked to you, but I just didn’t even think I’d get a chance to. Not unless I stopped Deucalion first.”

“I don’t know why you would think that, Scott,” Melissa says. Her voice is rising again, because otherwise he might hear the giant hole he’s just punched in the middle of it, and her. “You’re my son. You can talk to me—”

Scott exhales roughly. “I can’t do that if you don’t tell me you’re taking the night to go take on an entire pack yourself, Mom. Stiles said you didn’t even tell his dad—what if something had gone wrong? Where were you going to get back-up?”

“I thought about that,” Melissa says after a second. “I wasn’t going to deal with them all at once.”

“But what I’m trying to say is, you don’t even need to deal with them by yourself. You have me,” Scott says earnestly. “Me, and Stiles, and Stiles’ dad and I just—I just knew you were going to, so I tried to do it so you wouldn’t have to. So I know that backfired but I just don’t want you to—I don’t want you to end up dying when we’re almost done, Mom. Please.”

And just like that, all of the anger’s out of his voice and what’s left is her boy, still not quite an adult, leaning forward with his hands out and his eyes begging her. He still shouldn’t have done what he did, but it’s times like these that Melissa remembers neither of them chose to be in this situation. 

“I know,” she says. “And—”

“And I just—I just wonder sometimes, if you even think about what it’ll be like after, when we don’t have to think about my dad anymore,” Scott goes on in a rush. “I’m not saying you’re suicidal but it just feels like all you think about now is him and you always said, the point isn’t that we’re better than him. It’s that we’re _separate_. We’re not the same, we’re not in need, we’re going to be something where he just doesn’t matter. So I’m sorry, I just—I just worry about you.”

Melissa presses her lips together. Scott continues looking at her, searching her face for something, and then he starts to withdraw, shoulders pulling in, hands dropping to hang between his knees.

When she reaches out and cups her hands around his, he freezes. Then slowly looks up at again, the hope in his eyes so bright she has to will herself not to blink against it.

“Scott,” she says. “I still mean that. When we find your father, I’m going to take him out of our lives once and for all. I’ll be there for that, just like I’ve been around for all of your life before this. I know it might not always seem like that, but I made a promise to you and I’m going to keep that. Do you believe me?”

He licks his lips and almost says something, and then falters. His fingers twitch between her palms. Then he takes a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Okay. Then just…give me a little more time,” Melissa says. “A little more time, and just _trust_ me, Scott. Can you do that for me?”

This time the hesitation is longer, and his urge to ask her something even stronger. She can tell by the way his throat flexes as he swallows that back. But in the end, he nods. And that’s all she needs.

* * *

Once she’s sure he doesn’t need to be dosed with wolfsbane to heal properly, Melissa sends Scott upstairs to get in a shower and a proper nap. She’ll have to talk to him later about Derek and Allison, and how the hell _Stiles_ got involved in that—and talk to Stiles, damn it, because she loves the kid but his idea of a boundary is a Mobius strip—but as far as she can tell, any damage there isn’t physical. Scott needs to let his body heal fully, so she doesn’t have to worry about him surviving, and then they can tackle the rest.

Not A+ parenting, again, but she does what she does when she can, she thinks as she checks her phone. John’s texted her, curt bursts letting her know the bodies are handled, cover’s squared away, both Stiles and Scott have been excused from school. Speaking of people who are furious with her…

“Now what,” Melissa mutters, hearing the doorbell. With all the damn spells Stiles laid down on this rental, she should’ve had more advance warning than that, but that’s how tired she is.

Well, she’s got a few more things to do, and they weren’t going to include unexpected visitors so they’d better be prepared to get the hell out.

Victoria Argent’s on the doorstop, blinking rapidly. “Yeah?” Melissa says, covering her own surprise.

“I…thought Stiles might have been home, since the police were so busy last night?” Victoria says. She’s genuinely hesitant, her eyes darting around as if she’s expecting to be chased off any second.

That is actually a normal person’s reaction, but why Victoria is having it is what’s odd to Melissa. “Why are you looking for Stiles?” Melissa says, and doesn’t bother to hide the growl in her voice.

“I wasn’t. Oh—you think we’re still—no, no, we’re not trying to get you in trouble,” Victoria says hastily. She pulls the casserole tubs she’s holding a bit closer to her chest. Her clothes have been chosen to hide the bandages—Melissa can smell dried blood and liquid bandage and antibiotic cream—and she’s in flats, which explains why she also looks off-kilter to Melissa. Less make-up than usual, just lipstick. “I just thought if John was out all night, they might need something to eat.”

Melissa stares at her.

“Well, when the deputy was driving us home, he mentioned John doesn’t really cook,” Victoria adds, as if that explains everything. She waits for a moment, and then a flicker of impatience comes into her eyes, just as Melissa’s weighing up the odds of a demonic possession. “You did mention he was helping you, and last night—”

It starts to make a weird kind of sense to Melissa, who doesn’t let Victoria in but who relaxes her posture. “No, they’re both out, and anyway, Scott and I are staying over because of our house—don’t tell me Chris is over there.”

The little twitch in Victoria’s face turns into a head-shake. “No, neither of us had any idea where you might have gone, with your house the way it is,” she says. She pauses. “We were going to ask John, so that we could…but if you’re staying here as well…you can have these. I can always come later with more.”

She holds out the casserole dishes, and her wobble as she does betrays how precarious her balance is, even in flats. Melissa takes them from her mostly because of the wobble, and partly because the plastic lids are so thick and so tightly-fitted that she’s wondering if it’s interfering with her sense of smell.

“I thought it’d help. When you’re busy, cooking’s one of the first things to do, and sometimes you can’t even stop to order something,” Victoria says, with a slightly strained smile.

“Thanks,” Melissa says. “I’ll let John know.”

She starts to step back, pulling at the door at the same time to make it clear that Victoria isn’t coming in, but then Victoria clears her throat. Melissa fights down the urge to roll her eyes and assumes a mildly questioning expression.

“About—about what you said last night,” Victoria says. “About—”

“We got everyone currently in town, but we need to do some clean-up. Once we’re through with that, we’ll sit down and see where we are,” Melissa immediately says. This, at least, is something she’d expected Victoria to bring up. “I’ll have to let John know—he gets a say in this too. So we’ll reach out, all right?”

Victoria blinks once, then nods. “Well, thank you, I’m glad to hear that,” she says. Then steps forward again, as Melissa starts to move the door. “But that’s not what—”

Oh, right, there was the other thing. “I don’t want to talk about Allison right now,” Melissa sighs.

“Allison?” Victoria says, frowning, and for the first time she starts to look as suspicious as she usually does. “Why would you?”

“Well, Scott,” Melissa says after a second’s quick thinking. “I just talked to him, and he was telling me they just fought and she was really upset at him. But I just got here, and I’m not really sure what the two of them talked about so—”

“We’re not—we’re not going to fight with you over our children,” Victoria says abruptly. Not because she’s lying, but because she’s both extremely uncomfortable with this and also obviously feels it needs to be said. She shifts awkwardly in place. “We do need to talk with Allison, and…we’ll talk with her. We’re not going to drag your son into it, she’s our daughter, and…anyway, she’s over at the Hales’ place right now so he might not be in the picture now, to be honest. She checked herself out of the hospital without telling us.”

Melissa lets her brows go up. She had seen Derek in the car with Allison, but had assumed that was just giving him a ride. Interesting that Allison had stayed there, and long enough that she felt the need to tell her parents where she was. “Oh?”

“Well, I haven’t talked to Allison yet, but he was the one she’d flirt with before you and your son came, whenever she was mad at us,” Victoria mutters, a brief look of frustration flitting over her face. Then she pulls herself together and gives Melissa a brittle smile. “But I’m involving you in things you don’t need to worry about, I’m sorry. I just wanted to stop by and drop those off, and hope it’s useful.”

And then, with a little bob of the head, Victoria turns around and makes her way off the porch, gingerly maneuvering over the uneven part of the driveway. Chris is parked a few yards off but drives up as he sees Victoria come down. When he sees that Melissa’s watching them, he has a moment where his face clearly doesn’t know what to do, and then he stiffly raises one hand.

Bemused, Melissa raises her hand back, and then she goes inside to see what’s in the casserole dishes. They smell like pork fat and chocolate and butter, but…

They are pork fat and chocolate and butter. One dish is full of homemade cookies, while the other has uncooked burger patties in them, fingerprint dents clearly still visible.

When Stiles wanders into the kitchen several minutes later, Melissa’s still staring at them. 

“Um,” Stiles says. “So. Scott…said you two already talked, and—”

“You can’t just screw anybody who gets pissed off at you,” Melissa says, giving the burger dish a poke with her finger.

Stiles huffs. “I do not do that! I have standards! At the very least, they need to be pissed off _and_ self-destru—”

“You also can’t kill yourself trying to help Scott,” Melissa says, raising her head and watching Stiles freeze. “You can’t, Stiles. Your dad will kill you.”

“Well, there’s a catch-22,” Stiles mutters. He relaxes a little, but is still giving her a wary eye. “So…”

“Your father and I are going to talk, and then I’ll let him talk with you. I talked to Scott,” Melissa says with a shrug.

“Okay,” Stiles says after a moment. He edges up to the counter, plainly curious about the casserole dishes. He wants to just go with it, says relieved tinge to his scent, but then he firms up his shoulders. He and Scott are so alike in that, not being able to help themselves when it’s important. “Listen, about Dad—he’s doing his whole haikus of resentment thing again, but I think he’s really…and you should know, I thought about just telling him. About both of you.”

Melissa raises a brow. “But you didn’t.”

“Yeah, because I thought I could deal with it faster, and I’ll take the fallout for that,” Stiles says. He’s not quite as confident as he’s trying to make himself sound, his heartbeat skipping and slowing every so often. “But you just…you didn’t see how freaked-out Scott got when he realized what you were up to. He’s really scared, you know? And I almost think that’s half the reason Allison and Derek have his attention, because when he gets scared, he starts trying to find things to protect—”

 _And you won’t let him do that with you_ , is what Stiles is trying to say. Well, he knows her answer to that—because that’s her job. “I know,” Melissa says.

Stiles pauses, thinks about it, is going to say more, and then just falls back, not really covering up how unhappy he is about it all. But he understands her position more than his father does, a lot of the time, so in the end, he doesn’t push.

“Well, okay, so I’m going to check on him, and then I have to go figure out what to do with this sudden free day,” Stiles mutters. “Which I will not spend on Derek or Allison, in case you were wondering.”

“I don’t think Peter’s a good idea either,” Melissa says, and then suppresses a smile when Stiles twitches. His obsessions are easy to read, and Peter’s given Stiles more of a challenge than most. “Stiles, he and his sister just spent the night at the police station, and they just went home to God knows what Derek’s telling them. Don’t you think you should wait and see whether they’re going to shoot on sight?”

She’s expecting Stiles to roll his eyes, but instead he looks surprised. “Dad didn’t tell you? Peter and Talia both know now.”

“Know—why,” Melissa says flatly. “They were supposed to be in the _station_. With your _father_.”

“I…am not going to be the messenger on this one,” Stiles says, and when she starts to rumble in her throat, his eyes redden. He’s careful to keep his hands visible. “Listen, I fucked up last night, but that one’s between you and Dad. Don’t put me in—don’t make me—”

No. No, he’s right. Melissa swallows back her growl. “Never mind, I have to talk to him anyway,” she says. She starts to step away, then pauses just long enough to shove the casserole dishes over at him. “Test these, would you? That should fill in some of the time.”

“Test for what?” Stiles calls after her. “Poison?”

“Something like that,” Melissa says, marching on. Never mind about the sleep, she’s not done fighting today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even if werewolves heal, they shouldn't defy Newton's laws of physics, and a non-wolfsbane-loaded bullet will still transfer an awful lot of kinetic energy to the werewolf, physically pushing at them. Knocking somebody's legs out from under them would be a good stalling tactic.
> 
> Melissa's keeping the bullets for blackmail purposes, since bullets can often be traced back to a specific gun that fired them or a specific manufactured lot.


	3. Chapter 3

John doesn’t want to see her. “He’s over at the bank with Talia Hale,” explains Jordan. “You could go, but I should tell you that you’re definitely not dressed for a business meeting.”

“Is that what that is?” Melissa snaps.

Jordan doesn’t answer, just silently puts up his hands. For a second she glowers at him—hellhounds aren’t invincible and they both know that—and then she goes back out to her car and tries to think of what to do. Sends John three texts, only one of which he returns, and only to say that he’s going to make it to the rental for dinner. She replies that the Argents sent them hamburgers and then sits there for ten minutes while he doesn’t answer that.

In the end, she goes back to the rental herself. Braeden’s been by, Scott’s still asleep, and also the cookies are delicious, Stiles tells her. She does not take the cookie he offers, but does go upstairs to find her son.

Predictably, Scott’s in Stiles’ room. The bed is covered in printouts and homemade diagrams—Stiles is trying to work out another timeline, she guesses after a couple seconds’ looking it over—so they’ve pulled off the blankets and the pillows and Scott is curled up in the corner in a kind of nest. His skin has a grey tinge to it, and there are tight lines around his mouth that come back after she’s run a fingertip over them, trying to smooth them away. He’s too young for that.

She looks at him for another second. He hasn’t stirred an inch. Melissa bites her lip, then just gives in and gets down and wraps her arms around him. His breathing slows, and then he lets out a grunt and shifts towards her. She puts her head down on his shoulder and thinks _just a few minutes_.

* * *

When she wakes up, it’s three in the morning the next day, and Scott is gone. Melissa curses, checks the time on the nearest clock, curses again, and is getting a meal together for herself in the kitchen when Scott comes in.

“Oh, you’re up,” he says. He looks a little better, color not so bad, but his hair is a mess. “I know you wanted to talk to Stiles’ dad, but when we couldn’t wake you, he said you probably needed the sleep more and could just find him later.”

He hadn’t left any texts or voicemails saying so, when she’d checked her phone. Just more terse updates on what he had the police doing, and one saying he was handling the Hales. John is _angry_. “Where’s Stiles?” Melissa asks.

“Sleeping. Since we took his room, he took his dad’s,” Scott says, going over to the fridge. He pulls out a bottle of ketchup and puts it on the counter next to her plate. “He crashed pretty hard.”

“He usually does,” Melissa sighs. She takes the ketchup and flips up the lid and then stops just before squeezing the bottle. Then she turns back to the fridge, where the door hasn’t quite shut again. She catches the door with her foot and nudges it open and squints at the container she’d just gotten this hamburger patty from. “Did you two and John talk about whether you’re going to school tomorr—today?”

Scott takes the fridge door and holds it so Melissa can pick up the container. It’s a cheap square one, generic enough that she’s not sure whether she’s ever seen it in John’s things before, but it’s not the same one that Victoria had brought. “Yeah, we were going to,” he says. “Stiles’ dad did offer to write us another excuse, but it’s just going to look—look weird. It’s not like anybody knows we were involved in what happened last night, and Stiles has an Econ exam he wants to take, and…Mom?”

The remaining hamburger patties smell okay. The container’s smaller too, and when Melissa thinks about it, she can detect the odor of patty grease coming from the trashcan under the sink. So the other three must have had some. “He has an exam he wants to take?” she mutters, putting the container back. “Should I be worried?”

“No, he likes Finstock. Kind of.” Scott briefly looks as if he wishes he hadn’t brought it up. “I think it’s just because the last exam, Stiles wrote…one of those essays of his, and when we got them back, Finstock said something and Stiles realized he’d actually tried to read the whole thing and…anyway, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, Stiles just thinks it’s funny.”

That’s still not much of a reassurance about Finstock’s potential odds of survival, but Melissa decides that, given everything else, the Econ teacher can probably wait. She’s starving. “Well, all right, but if people start asking questions or if they start making any comments, I want you to call me.”

“I don’t think they’re going to notice us, especially if we go back today,” Scott says. When she’s done with the ketchup, he takes the bottle and puts it away. Then gets out a carton of juice, offering it until she caves and nods and lets him pour her a glass—which also tells her where Victoria’s dishes went, since she glimpses them behind his head in the cabinet with the other glasses. “I think everyone will be too busy wondering about Allison and Cora.”

“How would they know?” Melissa asks sharply, looking back at him.

Scott’s hand jerks, sending a rivulet of juice sloshing to the left. Just in time, he knocks the glass in the same direction with his knuckles and nothing gets spilled, but that doesn’t mean he’s composed himself. “I don’t think they’re going to be in school,” he finally says, not quite meeting Melissa’s eyes. “Here, do you want a napk—”

“How do you know they’re not going to be?” Melissa says. Then catches herself. She looks down right when Scott starts to look up—on purpose—and presses her fists against the counter on either side of her plate. Rocks up on them and then back down, taking a breath. “Scott, I know we asked you to find out about Allison—”

“Cora’s mom called John a couple times,” Scott says abruptly. He gets Melissa a paper towel off the roll for a napkin. “She wanted to talk about some kind of bodyguard, I think.”

“Excuse me?” Melissa says, incredulous. “What—because now she knows about werewolves and she thinks we owe her, or something like that?”

Scott shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know, Stiles’ dad just said it was something he was dealing with. But anyway, Cora’s mom wants to keep the whole family at home till we can prove to her that it’s over.”

“That what’s over?” Melissa says, and then she grimaces and shakes her head. She doesn’t really want another fight with Scott; she and he do need to talk about other things, but they don’t need to fight about it. They don’t need to fight, period, and she will admit to be tired and rundown and short-tempered. “Never mind, I need to talk to John anyway. I’ll ask him.”

“He said you probably would come find him,” Scott says, stiff-shouldered in the way he gets whenever Melissa and John are arguing. Unlike Stiles, he’s never been able to translate not taking sides into not feeling as if he’s letting one of them down. “Oh, and I only know about Allison because her dad called me.”

Melissa nearly chokes on her burger. “He what?”

“He wasn’t—Mom, maybe you should…” Scott nudges her the juice “…it’s okay, really, he wasn’t threatening or anything. He just wanted to know if I wanted him to get my work assignments too, since he was calling the school for Allison and we’re in all the same classes except for math.”

This time, Melissa swallows, but not because she’s any less shocked. “Well, what did you say?”

“I said thanks, but I hadn’t talked with you yet so I didn’t know if I was going to school or not,” Scott says, leaning back a little. He’s just as reluctant as she is to get into a fight, that’s obvious, but he’s still watching for one. “I don’t know how he got my number—I guess if they took Allison’s phone…anyway, he just said okay and to let you know if you needed anything. He said you two had talked?”

“Well, we did, but not about joint custody or something like that,” Melissa mutters. She was going to leave the Argents for later, but if they’re getting over their shock already…they had gotten off pretty lightly, given the state in which Deucalion usually left his targets. Which just goes to show no good deed goes unrewarded, she thinks irritably. “All right, thanks for letting me know. And I guess if you think going back to school would be a better look…you should get to do some normal things anyway. We have a little breathing space again and you can’t spend all your time chasing down leads.”

“Stiles’ dad said he was working that into the investigation,” Scott says. He shifts on his feet, as if he’s going to leave, and then turns to Melissa again. “Are you going back to work?”

Melissa hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest. John had sent one text saying he’d handled the hospital administration too, so even if he’s mad at her, she trusts he would’ve given them an open-ended excuse. On the other hand, there’d been so many bodies that running at least one through the morgue would probably be a big help to him. And she still has files sitting on her computer at the hospital that she wants to look through.

“I might put in a couple hours. I’ll see how I’m feeling,” she finally says, and doesn’t miss how relieved Scott is to hear that. “Just play it by ear. I’m pretty worn out.”

“I know, Mom.” Scott takes a step past her, then spins back. He puts his hand on her arm, pauses, and then leans in and presses his head against her shoulder as she wraps one arm around him. “Get some rest, okay?”

“You too. Or else get Stiles to take my facials and to do something about those bags under your eyes, all right? I don’t need another call from a concerned teacher like this Finstock,” Melissa says, hugging him tight.

“He’s not really that kind—I mean, I think he’s a good person, I just don’t think he notices that kind of thing,” Scott mumbles. He lets her hold him for another second, then tugs himself free.

He’s a good kid, Melissa thinks, watching him head back towards the stairs. Blackwood had messed things up because that was what the man _did_ , but he’s gone now. They have some time, and things will be all right, she thinks.

* * *

Melissa waits till a decent morning time, then dresses in the plainest work outfit she owns—the kind of slacks you wear because they go with everything, a no-wrinkle blouse—and goes into the hospital to catch up. First thing she does, she meets with the administration and arranges for a reduced-hours work schedule for the next couple weeks. Second thing, she takes the evidence her techs have collected from her rental house and puts it to the back of the queue.

Third, she calls Braeden. Gets voicemail, which is expected, and goes out and a couple blocks down to a coffeeshop to wait. She takes some backfile printouts from the morgue with her, which turns out to be an excellent decision because six pages in, she finally finds something relevant. 

Melissa takes a snapshot and texts it to Stiles, who of course pings her immediately with a string of emojis. She puts her phone aside and reads through the next page, and by the time she’s determined that yes, there is a page missing and yes, it would be the critical one stating who received the body, Stiles has gotten over his emojis and is texting her actual questions.

Not that he’s gotten any more commonsense. _Don’t leave school, you just went back. If you weren’t going to stay, you should’ve taken your dad up on his offer,_ she texts him.

_not at school, i did take him up on it,_ Stiles immediately replies, adding three question marks in a second text.

_Scott said you were both at school,_ Melissa texts. That’s after curbing her first impulse to just jump up and run out, because a familiar car’s just pulled into the parking lot. _What are you doing?_

_he did go, i didn’t. he’s not going to do anything._ Stiles types some more after that, but doesn’t actually send. Then, just as Melissa’s going to put her phone down, he comes out with: _allison isn’t at school today anyway._

So when Marin Morrell walks up to Melissa’s table, Melissa’s busy giving her phone an exasperated look. She tightens her grip around her phone when the other woman clears her throat, then puts on a reasonably neutral expression and looks up.

“Braeden called me,” Marin says, sitting down.

“I didn’t tell her to,” Melissa says. “And I also didn’t call you.”

“I know. John did,” Marin says. “He’s worried.”

Is that what he is, Melissa thinks, once she’s worked through the first slap of surprise. “Funny. Let me just text Stiles—”

“Stiles knows, I could hear him in the background,” Marin says. She crosses her legs and folds her hands over them. “I’m not here as a druid, Melissa. You’ve made it very clear that you have no need for an Emissary and we don’t force our services where they’re not wanted. I’m here because others are going to be concerned when they hear, and I want to know what your plan is.”

For a second, Melissa thinks about texting Stiles anyway. But Marin’s body language makes it clear she’s prepared to sit until she’s been heard, and texting would just make Melissa look insecure. “Well, I think you already know what it is.”

Marin stares at her, and Melissa wonders, not for the first time, if druids train themselves to try to be unnerving or if they just tend to self-select for those personalities. And then Marin closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, and is so obviously frustrated that Melissa actually is a little startled to have gotten through to the real her.

“You know what Blackwood’s reputation was,” Marin says. “And now that he’s gone, word will go around about who is responsible. Do you understand what that means?”

“That he was wrong? And not all alphas care as much about power as he did?” Melissa says with a shrug. She pokes at her coffee. “And if this is about what line you and your friends are going to be spinning out, I’d better make it clear that I did it because he threatened my family. That is the _only_ reason, and if anyone tries to turn this into some kind of crazy cult like him, then they’re going to regret it.”

“Melissa, no one has any interest in another Deucalion,” Marin says dryly. She still smells frustrated. “But he was right about one thing: the more alphas you kill, the more power you have. People will hear about that.”

“Well, it might be nice if they hear about that instead of my ex, for once,” Melissa snaps. Then has to make herself sit back and take a sip of coffee, trying to compose herself. The shop’s pretty quiet and they have a back corner, but she still isn’t going to let the other woman make her careless. “Look, I know what you’re getting at, and that’s not the plan. As soon as we know about Rafael for sure, I’m leaving this place.”

Marin nods slowly, watching her. Melissa lifts her cup again, deliberately breaking eye-contact as she drinks, and tries not to grind her teeth under the weight of the other woman’s stare. “And then what are you going to do?”

“Buy a house,” Melissa says, after a moment. She lowers her cup and looks into it. “Maybe closer to my mother’s family. I haven’t seen them since before Scott was born. Or then again, Scott might end up getting into college somewhere else, we’ll have to see.”

“I see,” Marin says. She shifts her knees slightly to the side, as if she might be getting up from the table, and then doesn’t leave. “So you do not have any interest in claiming Beacon Hills for your own?”

Melissa can’t help an exasperated noise. “Am I supposed to? Is this what alphas do?”

“I don’t pretend to assume you’re interested in being like other alphas,” Marin says, sounding almost as if she agrees with that. But then she purses her lips and goes right back to being frustrating, and wondering why Melissa doesn’t mind frustrating her right back. “John and Braeden both called me about you, because you didn’t arrange for back-up and that concerns them.”

“Don’t tell me they were calling _you_ for that,” Melissa mutters. 

“No. I think we’re clear that I was never going to be the person who killed Deucalion,” Marin says, with enough bitterness in her voice that Melissa looks at her. Marin meets her eye for a moment and then slouches the smallest bit, looking weary. “He’d gone down the wrong path. This doesn’t mean he started that way—I wish you’d at least see that. And even if you don’t believe in it, I took my duties as his Emissary seriously. We don’t betray those who have put their trust in us. Or else how would you ever believe enough to let us help in the first place?”

She isn’t lying; she does believe in what she’s saying. And it makes sense, even if it’s a coldblooded kind of sense Melissa can’t agree with. “Well, he’s gone,” Melissa finally says.

“And you won’t believe me either, but I am glad about that. It needed to be done, with who and what he’d become,” Marin says slowly, still looking off to the side. She breathes in deeply, then pushes herself back up and looks at Melissa. “But I think because I knew him, and saw what happened to him…that’s why they called me.”

“To warn me not to be like him?” Melissa says, just keeping herself from rolling her eyes.

“No,” Marin says, before Melissa’s even done. She pauses, letting Melissa finish, and leans forward. “No. Nobody believes you’ll be like _him_ , Melissa. And no, they didn’t call me to help you either. They called me because they knew I knew Deucalion the best, before and after, and they called me because they wanted to know how badly he’d gotten to you. _That’s_ what they asked me. You should think about why. Because you _should_ think about what you will do, when he’s dead.”

Then Marin gets up and heads for the door. For a druid, for her, that’d been unusually direct, and yet Melissa still gets the feeling that they’d been talking about multiple things.

She also has a pretty good idea about what else Marin had been driving at; druids like to talk around things but once you’ve been around a few, you realize they don’t actually work that hard to hide their agendas. Which pisses her off, but…maybe it’d been the fight with Scott, but she can’t quite just write it off as being manipulative. 

She should. Marin might be relieved Deucalion’s finally dead—Melissa does think that rang true—but she’s got other reasons to not be on Melissa’s side.

“Melissa?” Then Chris Argent winces, one hand lifting a few inches. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

He really shouldn’t have been able to, Melissa thinks, setting her cup aside and then using her napkin to mop up the coffee that’d sloshed out. “I thought you were going to get Allison back.”

“We did,” Chris says, looking puzzled, and at that point Melissa remembers this is actually a whole day later. “Oh—no, we…we picked her up from the Hales and took her home, and we…we had a good talk with her, actually.”

“That’s good to hear,” Melissa finally settles on. She supposes it is, since she honestly doesn’t wish any harm on Allison. She just thinks, if Braeden’s not going to show up, she’d like to get back to the morgue records, especially now that she’s narrowed down the time frame to just two months. “So—”

“I gave Scott a call,” Chris says, awkward about the subject change and self-conscious about it, from the stiff way his shoulders slant. “I think I might have given him the wrong idea—sorry about that. I just realized coming out of the principal’s office that he probably wouldn’t be back at school for a few days either, and—”

“Were you looking for me?” Melissa says.

Chris closes his mouth for a good second. “Talia let slip some—well, with her, it was probably on purpose, but anyway,” he says after a long pause. “She said John had told her it might take a few days before you were sure the town was clear. And that that included the preserve, and I’ve hunted in there, so I know it’s got a lot of ground to cover. The tunnels—do you know—”

“I know about the tunnels,” Melissa says, bemused. She probably shouldn’t be. When somebody’s first reaction is to ask questions about the cover-up and not about what’s being covered up, that’s usually a sign to check what exactly they are. “John does have a point, so that’s why we’re going to lie low.”

On the other hand, she is sure Chris is plain human, and so far he’s not coming off as threatening. Just a little ridiculous. “That makes sense,” he says. He glances down, then back up at her face. “I don’t know if it’d help, but I have these motion sensors—”

“Anyone who knows who I am probably would spot them first,” Melissa says, deciding to be rude and just get up. “Honestly, if you wanted to help, I’d love to know what Gerard did with his trophy collection, the private one. You know which one I’m talking about?”

She doesn’t stay to see what Chris’ answer is, and either he doesn’t know or, even with how much he clearly wants to be invited in, he doesn’t want to talk about his father, since he doesn’t follow her out. Hopefully that does it.

* * *

Coming out of the coffeeshop, Melissa has three people not cooperating with her: John, Braeden, and Stiles. Braeden she automatically writes off—the woman’s probably three states over by now—and John is being so difficult that Melissa rethinks her strategy about him and decides to just let him stew. Eventually he’ll boil over and then remember they’re a pack, and if it’s someone else who’s around when that happens…she’s done enough people’s work over the last few days. 

Stiles, on the other hand, is Scott’s best friend, and he has made some uncharacteristic decisions lately. He is a risk-taker, but usually they don’t feel so much as if he was just jumping onto the first desperate idea that occurred to him. So Melissa studies the morgue record she’d texted him, thinks about it and him, and then heads downtown to the law firm where Peter works.

“No, Mr. Hale isn’t in today,” the receptionist tells her, and then hands her a folded-over piece of paper. “He said you can find him and Mr. Stilinski here.”

“Mr. Stilinski,” Melissa repeats. “Did you happen to meet Mr. Stilinski? How old was he?”

The receptionist looks oddly at her, and Melissa sighs and mutters never mind, she doesn’t need to know and just takes the paper. When she unfolds it on the sidewalk, it has an address written on it. Of course.

Melissa’s fairly sure Peter isn’t talking about John, but then, John isn’t _answering_ her so she can’t ask him. She looks up the address on her phone and Google Maps tells her it’s located in an office park, which in Street View looks like pretty much every other office park. She swivels the view around, considers the visibility of the building from a couple different angles. Looks up the businesses listed as occupying the building, and then gets into her car.

As it turns out, when she drives over, Peter and Stiles are sitting patio-side at a café located across the street from the place. Stiles slumps sharply, like he thinks he can just slide under the spindly table, while Peter has a lemonade waiting for Melissa by the time she’s parked and walked over.

“I realize I’m assuming, but then again, your pack _did_ make my nephew into an accessory to murder and half a dozen other felonies,” Peter says as a greeting, pulling out a seat for her. “Have a seat. I was just explaining to Stiles that unfortunately, our archival system leaves much to be desired and while our log shows how many boxes there are and what the labels on them should say, it doesn’t pinpoint where they are in there.”

Melissa looks at Stiles, who at least has the grace to push away his half-eaten sandwich and act as if he shouldn’t be here. “Dad apparently explained things,” he mutters. “Like, not just the werewolf one. So then Peter and Talia talked and decided they’d like to get us out of town ASAP and they’re gonna do that by tracking down the alias Scott’s dad was using when he lived here. Since yeah, Peter’s firm did set him up with a new identity.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I jumping ahead? I didn’t realize we hadn’t brought everyone up to speed,” Peter says politely, as his eyes say he absolutely loves that fact. He waves at the empty seat. “Go ahead. We’ve got a long afternoon ahead of us, and the tap water in that building is barely drinkable.”

Stiles flicks his eyes up at Melissa, then stares at the table. He’s got both hands in his pockets and as Melissa reluctantly takes a seat, her phone pings. She looks at him and he looks pointedly down at her purse.

“Naturally, once I understood what Stiles was trying to get at, I thought I’d save my office the crime scene and intercept him in the basement and explain that we do not have the space there to keep files that old,” Peter goes on, pretending as if he doesn’t notice Stiles’ sudden guilty twitch. He has the remains of a salad on his plate and he spears a few leaves up with a wedge of beet and eats it, then dabs the beet stains neatly off his mouth. “Six months after a client file closes, we shift the documents out here, and then rotate them out on a regular basis to be destroyed.”

“It hasn’t been long enough for that to happen,” Melissa says, and then, as Peter raises his brows, she leans forward and picks up the lemonade. “Unless you went off-schedule. Or someone told you to do that.”

Stiles is frowning at her because he didn’t look that up. Peter looks mildly impressed. “Ah, yes, your legal knowledge,” he says. “That you’ve picked up here and there.”

“It tends to come with the job,” Melissa says flatly. The lemonade’s okay, she decides. Too much soda water in it, but it’s just a drink and she is a little thirsty. “So we know my ex-husband was a client of—”

Both Stiles and Peter start up. Then Peter, smiling graciously, nods to Stiles, who tosses him an irritated look before explaining: “Not really, it was more of a quid pro quo thing. He did a couple things for one of the partners and they helped him get a new identity, move in some money.”

“So the bank knew?” Melissa says.

Clearly irked, Peter opens his mouth, but again, Stiles gets there first. “Kind of and kind of not,” he says. “I mean, they’re still pulling records over there, but from what we dug up at the firm, it looks like they just set Scott’s dad up with an extra corporate card on the firm’s account. They hired him as a private investigator.”

Melissa snorts into her lemonade. Some soda gets up her nose and she puts the glass down, then pinches her nose till it’s cleared.

“Yeah, and the stuff he helped with, apparently he was looking into tracking down some potential alternate heirs in this estate dispute,” Stiles says, warming to the subject. “So they all died shortly after he reported on them. Heart attack, stroke…”

“Really? Smooth of him,” Melissa says.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Not really, they were all because they got freaked out. One made a 911 call the night before about hearing things on the roof, while the other one, they were found in a park and it _looked_ like they’d overdone it jogging.”

“Oh, right, sounds more like him,” Melissa says.

“Those did get past the coroners and the insurance companies,” Peter says, a touch wary under his light tone. “With considerably less clean-up than what we’re engaging in now, as I understand it.”

“Well, for regular people, I guess that sounds clean,” Stiles scoffs. “It’s a big fat giveaway for, um, us irregular folks. And trust me, he wasn’t getting a fake identity because he cared about the police catching up with him.”

Peter looks interested in spite of obvious efforts to pretend otherwise, leaning forward, and then he starts as Melissa clears her throat. “My ex,” she says. “So what happened to him?”

“That does seem to be the question, doesn’t it,” Peter says, with more than a little bit of annoyance in his tone. Then he seems to remember that it is, in fact, the question, at least if his goal is to really get rid of them quickly. “He worked for the firm for about six months, and then he stops showing up on the expense reports. The engagement was purely project-based, and given the motivation, he may very well have just worked off what was due.”

“I doubt it,” Melissa says. “And so do you, if there are enough old boxes in your archives that you’ve got Stiles and me out here.”

She’s right, says Peter’s expression, and also, he’s not particularly happy at her guessing his big reveal. “Stiles showed me the morgue report you found, and I remember helping to clear up some of the estate for that one,” he says after a moment. “You realize that that was the partner who’d hired your ex-husband in the first place.”

“Cause of death being accidental electrocution,” Melissa says. “The police assumed it was due to the car battery he’d been tinkering with, which was found next to him in the garage.”

What had caught her eye was the photo included with the report, showing the car battery. The wires trailing out of it had been all wrong for tinkering, but made complete sense if you were trying to incapacitate a werewolf. Peter, however, goes in a completely different direction. “Most of the estate went to the man’s family, but the will had instructions to ship a selection of books from his library to someone who was a complete stranger to them,” he says. “None of them cared that much about the books so they didn’t object, and when the books were shipped back because the sender couldn’t be found, they didn’t want them. The firm just put them into storage. I happened to be the one who oversaw that part, and now that I have the context for it, some of the titles were…shall we say, suggestive.”

“He means they were grimoires and stuff like that,” Stiles says impatiently. “So this guy who was supposed to get them, I’m guessing it was Scott’s dad. He didn’t get them, and nobody ever looked into why—”

“No, we _did_ , it’s just we couldn’t find any trace of this person,” Peter says. “The family wasn’t interested and no one was paying us for it, so we shelved the matter.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Fine. So somebody looked into it, then got bored—” he keeps his expression sullen but smells amused when Peter sighs heavily “—and now Peter’s more than happy to dig up the cold case, _except_ that we’re talking about three to four standard office boxes in five storage rooms that each hold up to three hundred boxes each. And they apparently just stack the boxes as they come in, without a grid system or something, you know, logical.”

Melissa nods and picks her lemonade back up. She drinks it, thinking it over, and then pulls out her purse. Does not check her texts, but instead pulls out her wallet and puts two twenties on the table. That earns her a half-chagrined, half-annoyed look from Stiles, but honestly, a couple zingers aside, he hasn’t come anywhere near making up for the fact that he’s sitting here with Peter, let alone for that smug note Peter had left for her. He doesn’t need to have Peter paying for his lunch too, and she damn well isn’t going to start down that road.

“Well, are we done?” she says.

Peter frowns, then lifts one hand. “Wait—”

“No, I just figured we should let you catch up and it’s nicer out here than if we were doing this inside. The ventilation’s bad and he is right about the tap water,” Stiles says, shrugging and starting to get up.

“I thought—are we not talking about this?” Peter says, a note of uncertainty creeping into his voice. “Isn’t this useful information for you?”

“Not as useful as what could be in those boxes,” Melissa says. “So are you letting us look for them, or aren’t you?”

For a second, Peter looks very much as if he might withdraw the offer out of sheer confused spite. Then he recovers—resentfully, still clearly disliking her confidence—and gives her a tight nod. “All right, we’ll go.”

* * *

Peter’s obvious plan was to keep them stuck looking for the boxes all afternoon and wear them down till he got what he wanted out of them. The only thing Melissa isn’t sure about is what, exactly, Peter wanted, and since she isn’t interested in giving it to him, she doesn’t really bother to find out what that was. She just wants to know how Stiles let it get to this in the first place.

“Did you talk to Dad yet?” Stiles mumbles, a little desperately, as he and she immediately start unstacking and restacking boxes to make a path for themselves, and also, cut Peter, who’s slow to follow, off from them.

“No, I haven’t,” Melissa says, watching the tiny red dot on Stiles’ phonescreen. “I haven’t been able to talk to him, since I haven’t seen him. What exactly happened at the station?”

The red dot abruptly zags left five feet. She automatically reaches for a box on that side, then stops herself as Stiles, cursing, flicks the back of the phone. “Ugh, sorry, things got banged around in the fighting and I didn’t get a chance to recal—so you haven’t, um, talked to Jordan either? Or Tara? She hasn’t checked out of the hospital yet because she’s still on concussion watch but I know she’s got her phone.”

“Am I at the hospital?” Melissa says, with enough of an edge in her voice that Stiles grimaces.

“Okay, okay, I just…didn’t want to usurp anyone’s story,” he mutters.

“What are you looking for?” Peter calls over at them. He’s several yards back, stifling a cough and struggling to step over a two-high wall of boxes. When they look back at him, he teeters, then stumbles and knocks one hip into another box stack. Then rights himself, giving the dust smears on his trousers a disgusted look. “These all are labeled as two years older than the year we’re looking for, so if they’re up front, I doubt this room will have them.”

“Sure, okay, got it,” Stiles says in a deliberately absentminded tone, as he shows Melissa his phone. The dot’s gone back to more or less where it was. “So, um, Dad…so after you came back from dinner with the Hales talking about how annoying they were, Dad, um, Dad—you know, intellectually, it totally makes sense, no point in building a staircase when somebody’s already provided a ladder—”

Melissa swallows a sigh. “I know he was screwing Talia Hale. Move on.”

“Oh. Oh, good! I mean, um—right.” Stiles studies his phone extra-hard as he heaves up boxes with his free hand. “Anyway, after the whole thing about Allison landing in the hospital, Peter and Talia followed him back to the station and Peter was ‘allegedly’ helping to schedule a time for Derek to give a witness statement while Talia and Dad, um, talked, and suddenly Talia springs all these photos of people following her and Peter and Dad’s saying he’ll look into it right away, except Talia thinks we’re paying for the tails, and then the call about Tara comes in and Dad rushes out.”

“Did either of you hear me?” Peter snaps. “This isn’t the room.”

Stiles flaps his hand vaguely in Peter’s direction, now genuinely studying his phone. They should be almost on top of the boxes, according to the magic-detector. “He checks the schedule, realizes what you and I have done, and then you called him, apparently…” Stiles sneaks a glance at Melissa, who doesn’t give him a reaction, and then sucks in his breath “…so he tried to excuse himself but Talia and Peter kept accusing him of some conspiracy about blackmailing them and so he wolfed out to show them we _totally_ have other problems here.”

Melissa stops with her hands on a box lid. “He what?”

“Look, Dad’s not crazy or possessed, I checked. And he hasn’t lost his sense of priorities about preferring to deal with hunters over being locked up in some black-ops lab somewhere,” Stiles hurriedly adds. “I’m sure this made complete sense in context. To him. In that moment.”

“Right,” Melissa says. “And then he…sat them down, and explained everything, and they all calmly decided to cooperate with us?”

“Well, no, but after we pointed out we have some very useful connections in the construction business, namely, that developer who’s building the condos on the east side, I think he saw the light,” Peter says. He pauses, looking between them, and is obviously ruffled when neither of them are surprised that he’s finally caught up. “ _Then_ he explained that werewolves exist, they fight with each other, and apparently, some years back, my firm had the poor taste to take the side of your ex-husband.”

“They probably couldn’t have known there were sides back then, since that was just six months after we’d split and I don’t think Rafael would have been bragging about how I and my underage son had thrown him out,” Melissa says, shrugging. She picks up the box by the slots in the sides and tilts it for Stiles to scan with his phone. “I take it John talked you into helping us out?”

Peter’s a little warier now that it’s clear he’s lost the upper hand, but he cranes his neck to look at Stiles’ phone rather than the box. “Oh, I wouldn’t say he talked _us_ into it. More that Talia and I have a deeply vested interest in a safe, stable place to live in, and trying to get that by attacking you seems much more work than just giving you what you want.”

Stiles’ phone finishes the scan and beeps, and then a series of symbols fills the screen. He nods and Melissa pries off the box lid.

The box contains books. Melissa starts to pick one up, then whips her head around as someone hisses sharply. Then she and Stiles both look at Peter, who is trying very hard to not look as if he’d nearly told them to _not_ do that. “Do we not need…precautions?” he says, gesturing vigorously but meaninglessly. “Aren’t these magical books?”

“No, they’re books about magic. They’re not bombs,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes as he sticks in a hand and pulls out the top book. He flips it open, then snaps it shut and shoves his nose into the crook of his arm. “Ugh. But definitely, definitely moldy. Maybe OSHA’s gonna have something to say about this.”

“So you’re going to help me find out what happened to Rafael,” Melissa says to Peter. It’s not a question.

“We’re pragmatic. If you’re here only because this is the last place he was seen, and you need to know what happened to him, then logically, once the mystery is cleared up, you would have no more need to be here,” Peter says, adding a very thin, razor-edged smile at the end. “You do seem to be very efficient once you’ve located the problem, as far as I can tell. So might as well move that process along. John did say he’d be tied up with all those bodies so you’d be taking the lead on the investigation.”

Stiles is trying to make covert grimaces at her. His arm and the book he’s holding aren’t great screens for hiding that from Peter, and he doesn’t seem willing to stop so finally Melissa gives him a nod. She can tell Peter’s leaving a few things out, and anyway, even at his angriest, John isn’t going to sell her and Scott out so she isn’t remotely convinced by Peter implying John told him how to guess she’d come looking for Stiles.

And anyway, none of that’s important compared to finding Rafael. “You said three more boxes, right?” Melissa says.

Peter blinks, surprised, and then recovers by taking out his phone. “Yes, three. If you can turn that one around, I can check the code against the list…or I suppose Stiles could demonstrate that little trick with his phone. Up to you.”

“Or I can memorize the list and read for myself,” Stiles mutters. He hunches down next to a stack of boxes, then shuffles over and twists around to look at something behind it. “Okay, got two here—nope, three. We’re good—right?”

“Right,” Melissa says, and as Peter frowns and raises his hands, she drops the box into them. “Let’s take ‘em out and have a look.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hales were a bit too much in each other's heads (literally, per the show), so exploring that theme with Melissa's pack. The whole idea of a tie that's stronger than a blood relation is very interesting in isolation, but since we mostly only got to see packs breaking up, we never got to see what exactly that means. Which is really unfortunate since you had a pack that was _also_ blood family, in contrast to the other packs shown, and so you could really have played around with levels of intimacy and how that might result in different ways of conceiving relationships and relationship morality. Like, for example, deprioritizing sex over other methods of expressing trust and loyalty.
> 
> I think one of the reasons why, despite my reams and reams of end notes ripping TW to shreds, the show's grabbed me enough to generate so much writing is occasionally it came up with a really brilliant little characterization moment, like Stiles and Melissa's interaction in the first episode where she nearly takes a baseball bat to him because he's trying to sneak around on the roof of her house like a burglar. I wish the two of them had had more of those.
> 
> I probably enjoy setting up overconfident!Peter a little too much.


	4. Chapter 4

Most of the books inside the boxes are fakes, at least in the sense of having any use for supernatural purposes. They’re probably real enough as old, rare volumes, and certainly the prices Peter keeps pulling up on the Internet impress him, but none of the information in them is remotely accurate. But they’re clearly fakes with a purpose, chosen for subject matter that’s just close enough to the handful of true supernatural treatises included to be easily confused with them.

“The thing is, why put in all this effort to hide stuff in plain sight if you’re just going to have basic magic how-tos?” Stiles finally says, giving one book an annoyed poke. “Okay, fine, you’re a capitalist, transmuting things into gold never gets old, but you have a way higher profit margin just lawyering around town _and_ don’t have to spend money to launder money.”

“Or you simply don’t kill the golden goose,” Peter says. He’s far less annoyed and far more fascinated with how Stiles keeps trying to ignore him. “We’re not still disputing whether this Rafael killed all those people, are we?”

“No. And we’re also not arguing about whether he’d be stupid enough to lose his temper and kill a business partner, because he has,” Melissa says, flipping through her book. “I wouldn’t read that much into it, for all we know your old mentor rejected an expense report because the receipt wasn’t readable and Rafael took it as a sign of disrespect.”

Halfway through, she gives up on the book and puts it down. She’s not going to get any insight into why Rafael wanted these by reading them, at least not this century. And it’s not just that she isn’t any good at books of magic—she’s okay, but John and Stiles both live and breathe this stuff—but that it just doesn’t pull at her gut. Rafael was never one for the books either. He knew how to use them but he never really liked holing up and studying something, not when he could be out doing. That had been something she’d found very attractive, back when she hadn’t known better.

She does now, and she knows Rafael wouldn’t have spent enough time with these books to have left meaningful traces. If he’d even gotten them in the first place.

“…mentor, that’s a stepping-stone,” Peter’s saying, but he’s distracted as Melissa pulls the empty boxes back over. He gets up, one hand raised, and then holds off to just watch cautiously. “They’re empty.”

“I’m just saying, you can label things whatever you want when you’re telling the story, but you might wanna check that your labels are consistent with your details,” Stiles snarks back. Then he too looks over. “Melissa?”

The boxes aren’t completely empty. Each book had come wrapped carefully in paper or cloth, and in one case, in bubble-wrap. When they’d unwrapped them, they hadn’t shredded the coverings but hadn’t given them much of a look either, since those hadn’t had any interesting scents and had looked completely plain. But when Melissa goes over one of the papers more closely, she finds a small number written on it in pencil; by the creases she guesses it would have sat at the bottom of the spin when the paper had been folded around the book.

“That’s the catalog number,” Stiles says, checking his phone.

Only half-hearing him, Melissa starts examining the other papers. “I’m looking for an eight,” she mutters when Stiles begins to say something. “I think—here. Right. Rafael packed these up.”

“So he was ensuring the right books would be shipped to him,” Peter says.

“No?” Stiles says, looking at Melissa’s face.

Melissa presses her lips together, looking at the sheet lying in her hands. She hates that she knows the man so well, even now. Hates it, and is counting on it. “What if the point was for the books to never get to anyone in the first place?” she says. “What if he was just trying to get them out of town?”

“But why wouldn’t he ship them to storage, or someone who’d at least pick them up and hold them for him?” Peter says, sounding annoyed. He thinks they’re dragging this out on purpose, the naïve man. “Or for that matter, to himself, if he was leaving—”

“Because he wasn’t,” Melissa says. She drops the paper and watches it waft into Stiles’ snatching hand. “He wasn’t leaving. He was dealing with something here, someone—they were the ones who’d want those, and he just got the books temporarily out of town because he thought like usual that he could handle it, and then that something didn’t go like he thought. Excuse me.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” Peter demands, and when Melissa simply stops and looks at him, his heartbeat spikes. His eyes don’t quite go to the door, or the table and the other werewolf who along with Melissa are between him and that, but he does make an effort to soften his voice. “The books were shipped about two months after the last expense report we can trace to your ex-husband. It’s entirely possible he was still in town after that, I’m not saying it isn’t, but I’d have to go back to the office and—”

“Well, by all means, don’t let me hold that up,” Melissa says, continuing to the door. “Oh, no, don’t get up, I’m just going home. School should be over, so I need to check in on my son.”

Peter pauses. Something about that doesn’t sit right with him, but he can’t think of a way to stall her, and that is written all over his face. Then he turns, sharply enough to catch Melissa’s attention and stall her, and looks at Stiles. “And your father…”

“Is having a late night at the office, so probably I’ll text him later and see if he wants me to drop off some clothes?” Stiles says, raising his brows and not getting up from whatever he’s doing with his phone and the brown paper wrapping Melissa had had. “Hey, I have a sick note and I could fail all of my remaining tests and still have a four-plus GPA, so I’m good. You not good?”

“Oh, no. No. I think I am too,” Peter says slowly, looking hard at Stiles, who turns a shoulder to him and starts looking through the books again.

There’s no way Stiles can’t handle Peter, his slip-up earlier today aside, so Melissa isn’t worried about leaving them alone. But Stiles does get wrapped up in proving himself sometimes, same as Scott, and Melissa…thinks John should have seen that already. So she’ll just text him, she thinks with more than a touch of irritation, and she leaves the two of them to it.

* * *

When Melissa’s a block away from John’s rental house, she can already tell that there’s company over. She texts Scott, who answers immediately and who then meets her on the driveway, with the front door slowly waving open behind him because he forgot to make sure the latch clicked on his way out.

“I didn’t invite them,” he whispers urgently. “I just stopped by our place to get some more clothes, because Stiles’ dad called and said it was clear, and after that I was going to pick up something for dinner and they pulled up right next to me and I didn’t want to make a scene and—”

“Scott,” Melissa says, squeezing his shoulders and looking into his eyes. “Scott. _Breathe_. Okay?”

For a second he stares at her, all huge eyes and nerves in his scent. And then he breathes in, hiccupping at the end, and nods. Straightens up, turns around, and smiles as he and she walk up the drive towards Victoria Argent, who’s standing in the doorway and looking out at them.

Victoria’s got her usual warpaint on, but the bottom half of her dress is loose and flowing and mostly hides the stiffness in her gait. “Melissa,” she says pleasantly, while her heartbeat skips all over the place. “I know we’ve invited ourselves over without calling ahead, but when Allison and I ran into Scott—”

“You can definitely do better than McDonald’s,” Allison says, popping out from behind her mother. She has a long-sleeved shirt on, which isn’t hiding the wrap on her arm because the sleeves are rolled up. Her hands smell like onions and parsley. “I know it’s been a really rough week, and Mom makes an amazing sausage and peppers, and we just thought it was the least we could do.”

Scott slows down, dropping slightly behind Melissa, and she can hear the small guilty noise he makes in his throat, too low for the others to pick up. She reaches back and hooks his arm, and marches up to the Argents without missing a step. “That’s very nice of you,” she says, watching Victoria’s eyes widen slightly. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d have the time.”

“Well, my arm’s a little stiff and the doctor said to give it a couple days so I wouldn’t accidentally rip out the stitches, but you can only study so much,” Allison says cheerfully. She steps back to let them in, then smiles at Scott. “By the way, have you done anything for chemistry yet? I was doing the latest problem set earlier and I brought it over, if you want to go through the answers together.”

“Um,” Scott says, eyes darting to Melissa. “I—thanks but I—um, my mom—”

“Have you looked at any of your homework yet?” Melissa says. She pauses to take her shoes off and unpin her hair, then pushes the door out of Victoria’s grip and shuts and locks it. Then turns back to her stuttering son. “They didn’t give you a lot, did they? I know you went in but I’d hope your teachers would go easy on you. John said he’d call and let them know your schedule.”

Scott starts to catch on. “Um, honestly, I haven’t really,” he says. He twists like he wants to ignore Allison, but doesn’t quite go so far around that he’s giving her his shoulder. “They gave me some papers to sign—I think some of them are for you, if I need to be out again for the investigation or something like that. Let me—let me just go get them for you?”

When Melissa nods, Scott takes off for the stairs so quickly that she almost calls him back to scold him for being so obvious. But then she remembers, and turns just in time to catch Victoria watching his disappearing back with a much warier expression on her face.

Allison is also watching Scott, but the look on her face is plain frustration. Then she and her mother both realize they’ve been caught out: she ducks her head, pretending to tuck her hair behind one ear, and mutters about checking on the food, while Victoria’s face stiffens, then settles into a kind of careful interest.

“Go ahead. Don’t forget to sear both sides before you pour in the broth,” Victoria says to her daughter, who promptly excuses herself to the kitchen.

“Sausages,” Melissa says once they’re alone.

“We make them at home,” Victoria says. Pauses. “We hunt game—because it’s a good skill, but also because it does make delicious food and it can be very cost-effective if you know how to not waste the cuts. We just made up a batch of fresh ones with some deer meat, and Talia said you clearly weren’t vegetarians—”

Melissa blinks. “I thought you and Talia hated each other.”

“Well, I certainly don’t _like_ the woman,” Victoria says, dropping the prissy tone she’s been using so far. Then she looks embarrassed, and takes a deep breath before she goes on. “We’ve spoken. Chris doesn’t think it makes sense to blame them for what his father did, at least as far as this latest mess is concerned.”

“That’s nice,” Melissa says. “So what are you looking for, exactly? Because if it’s about Gerard, I told you I’d get back to you and I also told you nobody’s currently in danger, so if you could just wait till I got back on my feet and _not involve my son_ —”

“That wasn’t what we meant—we’re just bringing over dinner,” Victoria says. She smells surprised, but the hardness of her tone doesn’t belong to any oblivious housewife. “We barely know what you are, and you can’t honestly think we’re a threat—”

“I can and I do, and I think you’re smarter than to think I wouldn’t. You shot one of us. You know we bleed, and I’ve met enough people to know that means it’s just a matter of time before you figure out how to keep us bleeding,” Melissa snaps. She takes a step towards Victoria, and then another one when the other one flinches. Then she stops there, but she does let her arms swing out slightly, broadening her shoulders. “ _Thank_ you for the dinner, and for seeing my son home. Now let me just get your Tupperware and you can be on your way.”

Then Melissa turns on her heel and walks into the kitchen. Allison is rattling around with pans and tongs at the stove in a way that says she only got there a second ago, and she keeps trying to see what Melissa is doing. She nearly sprinkles the parsley on the floor instead of the pan and, sighing, Melissa pulls open the cabinets till she finds what she’s looking for. 

She takes out the casserole dishes Victoria had brought the other day, and sets them on the counter, letting Allison get a good look. Then, since John or Stiles didn’t do a good job washing them up—she knows it wasn’t Scott who left that grease in them—she takes them over to the sink.

“Allison, I think these just need to simmer now, so would you go and finish up your homework?” Victoria asks quietly, coming into the kitchen just then. There’s a tense moment Melissa can sense without turning around, and then Victoria exhales tiredly and Allison walks out of the kitchen.

The grease on the bottom of the dishes is white and thick, hardened by the fridge, and while Melissa could just scour it off with a little extra-human strength, she tends to break dishes when she’s annoyed. She presses her lips together, then decides that she does in fact want to give them back in one piece and just squirts dish soap into them. 

“I honestly didn’t think you’d see it that way, but I can understand why you would. I apologize—it wasn’t what Allison and I had in mind, to scare you,” Victoria says. She has her back to Melissa, standing at the stove and prodding the sausages with the tongs. “I do want to know what Gerard did to put us in danger, but not by threatening you. And I really only thought of dinner because Talia said you’d eaten so much meat when she had you over, like you were starving, and you were so torn up—I know you healed, but I was thinking that has to cost you. Or am I wrong?”

Melissa looks at the bright blue squiggles in the bottom of the dishes, then steps back. She knocks on the water to run into them with her wrist. There was the cookie dish too, she remembers. She didn’t see it in the cabinet and it’s not on the counter either; she sniffs and then locates it in one of the other cabinets close to Victoria. 

“I’m also not asking because either of us thought we’d take up hunting werewolves next,” Victoria adds. She tenses when Melissa comes over, but only glances one over her shoulder before going back to tending the sausages. “I did what I had to do, but I’m not an idiot. Chris and I would have died if you hadn’t been there.”

“So you’re not interested at all in how to kill us the next time?” Melissa says, taking down the cookie dish.

Victoria looks over again. Her eyes drop briefly to the dish and then back to Melissa’s face. She smells like a combination of confusion, nervousness, and a surprising amount of exasperation. “I’m interested in how to _stop_ a werewolf, yes,” she says. She hesitates, clearly waiting to see whether Melissa takes offense. “Chris’ father was forever trying to get him to join in. Talking about his ‘valuable’ skills, and how he’d make a whole lot more money, and telling business partners they could just show up at our home without any warning…you shouldn’t have to throw your own father out of your house just to keep your child safe.”

“You do what you have to do.” The cookie dish isn’t so bad, with the chocolate smell coming from just a tiny dried fleck on the inside. Melissa rubs it off with her thumb and puts the dish aside. “Like you said.”

The surprise fades slowly from Victoria’s face. “Well, some wouldn’t see it that way—my family, for example. They’re very traditional…but then we never told them half of what Gerard did. And what we had to do to make it stick when we threw him out—he showed up a couple months afterward, when Allison and I were home alone, and tried to make us go with him.”

“Make you?” Melissa says, hearing the tremble in Victoria’s voice.

Victoria begins pulling the sausages out of the pan and setting them on a plate. “Fortunately, I’m a good shot, and we keep a gun in the kitchen,” she says. She lays out three sausages and then raises her head. Her gaze is level enough, but the tongs are clacking in her hand and that’s not the one with the bad scrapes. “I only broke his cane, but now that I think about it, and what we’re dealing with now…I really wish I’d shot him. I only held back because I didn’t want Chris to have to deal with the fallout.”

Something about the way Victoria’s regretful tone bites puts a inkling in Melissa’s head. “Did you ever tell him?” she asks.

“Him?” Victoria says, blinking blank eyes, and for a second Melissa thinks confessional time is over and Victoria’s going to slide into some platitude about how she understands Melissa’s protective instincts and so they should naturally be allies. Then Victoria lowers the tongs to rest on the edge of the pan. She absently shifts in place, picking up one foot sharply as something in her calf area hurts. “No, I didn’t tell Chris. I made Allison swear to not tell either, and…that’s when she started arguing with me. It’s really more me than Chris—she just blames him for backing me up.”

Then, taking a deep breath, Victoria raises the tongs and moves the rest of the sausages. She turns up the heat and tilts the pan over it, adding some vinegar and spices and using the swirl of the juices to do the mixing for her. Last she adds in sliced bell peppers and onions, wilting them before pouring it all over the sausages.

“I can’t keep my daughter indoors forever,” Victoria says, turning around with plate in hand. She looks at Melissa with an awkward, strained expression on her face; she’s not used to asking. “It’s her last semester and there’s prom and graduation and it’s just not fair to her, to lose all those things. I know you don’t owe us a thing, and Chris is already trying to see how soon he can get someone to look into Gerard’s things, but if you could give us any idea of when you _could_ tell us exactly what Gerard took from you, and how we can fix it—”

Oh. This. Melissa breathes out, only realizing then how much she’d tensed up herself. She’d been beginning to think she really wouldn’t ever be able to figure out Victoria. “We’re trying to find my ex-husband,” Melissa tells her. “We thought he’d died, but then we found out he probably faked it, maybe with Gerard’s help. We’ve been tracking him and this is the latest place we’ve found out he was. Honestly, the things he took and sold to Gerard—I don’t want them back. I just don’t want—don’t want him to be the one who _has_ them.”

Victoria nods slowly. “We cleared out the properties and put it in storage, up in Washington.” Then she winces. “What wasn’t seized by the police for their investigations—we didn’t contest any of that. And there were some people at the funeral—they said Gerard owed them this or that, and we told the executor to just make it happen. We didn’t know—”

“Well, you wouldn’t have,” Melissa says sharply. She understands where Victoria is coming from now, and is no longer worried about that. But that means she’s feeling impatient to get back to work, now that Peter’s put them on a real lead. “All right, you might as well have a bite before you go, since they’re your work. But you and Chris really don’t need to do anything right now. I’ll make a list when I get a moment and if you just want to see if you still have it, that works for me.”

That should do it, she thinks, as Victoria gives her a relieved smile. One down.

* * *

Dinner is more than a little awkward, especially when Scott insists on coming to eat at the table ‘so you’re not on your own, Mom’ and then looks guilty every time Allison asks him something and he ends up starting a conversation with her. Melissa’s not particularly impressed with the girl, especially when she starts dropping hints about how Derek’s going to be driving her to the hospital for physical therapy. Why Victoria doesn’t just cut that off, Melissa chalks up to the woman still feeling as if she has to play in front of Melissa.

“It’s a change from blaming you all the time to my face, I guess,” Melissa tells Scott after they’ve shooed out the Argents (pointing out dark is falling is effective with Victoria, not so much with Allison, but Victoria does put her foot down then). “Anyway, sorry about that, baby, but you’re right about not causing a scene with them. They’re too spooked right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they rethought all these food handouts once they’ve had a little time.”

“I don’t know about that, Mom,” Scott says, but he’s looking at his phone so she assumes he’s just trying to convince her that people aren’t so bad, like he usually does. “Hey, so Stiles says you and he and Peter Hale found a lead?”

“I think we did,” Melissa admits. “But it still needs a lot of research, so after I shower, I’m going to head back to the hospital and pull some more records.”

Scott nods, but when she starts to head upstairs, he follows her. “Do you need any help?”

“I’m just going in to get the files,” she tells him. “I’m not going to look at them there, I just can’t get them unless I’m on the intranet when they’re that old—”

“Yeah, you told me about that,” Scott says patiently. He still goes upstairs with her, and when she stares blankly at the empty drawer in John’s bedroom where she keeps her spare outfit, he comes in with a duffel bag. Then blushes when she hugs him. “Here, toss out your clothes and I’ll get a load started while you’re out. We’re um, we’re both running kind of low on clean underwear.”

He’s a little too old for it now, but Melissa can’t help hugging him again. “Thanks, baby. You’re so good at remembering this when I’m all over the place.”

“Well, I don’t want you to do everything. I’m old enough now,” Scott says. He’s a little pointed about it and she looks at him, but then he ducks away. “Be right outside the door.”

It isn’t till Melissa’s in the shower scrubbing down her hair and listening to the distant rumble of the washer that she realizes what he’s really doing: finding an excuse to hang around the house until she comes back from the hospital. She really is just planning to go there and back, but that Scott doesn’t just take her word for it…she leans her head against the tile for a few seconds, letting the water run down her back. They have work to do.

They really do, and first, she thinks, pulling herself back, she needs to find those damn files.

* * *

Thanks to Peter’s pinpointing the month and year for her, Melissa only needs to curse at the computer for fifteen minutes before she finds the right entries in the morgue’s electronic files. Which show no activity whatsoever.

That’s ridiculous, and is an instant red flag that they’ve been tampered with. Which Melissa had been half-expecting, and so she sighs and shifts over to checking the hospital’s employment rolls for who’d been around then. She already has a few suspects she’s been checking up on, but so far they’ve all turned out to have died since then. She’s expecting more of the same, and having to just turn the lead over to John and Stiles to figure out where people were buried and who their next of kin were—that’d be Peter now, she supposed, since his firm or Talia’s bank seem to have had a hand in nearly every death in Beacon Hills for the last fifteen years.

She’s not expecting Laura Hale to come charging into her office, wielding a sleek baby-blue metal water bottle as if it were a gun. “I can’t believe you!” Laura snaps.

Melissa had heard her coming, but logging out of the HR system without leaving tracks takes some care and that’s a little harder to cover up than a Hale temper tantrum. “If this is about what I am, I’m not doing this at work, Laura.”

“Oh, _that_ ,” Laura says sarcastically. “That. I could go on and on about that, and how that just—just is such a _YA_ novel kind of thing to spring on somebody—”

Melissa’s out. She shuts her laptop and stands up.

“You are _not_ leaving,” Laura says.

“Yes, I am. Because I actually like you, Laura, and I can understand why you feel how you do. But I don’t have the luxury to care about it. I’m sorry,” Melissa says, picking up her purse and her workbag. “If you don’t want to speak to me again, so be it, but I need to get home and be with my family.”

“Because my family doesn’t count for anything except to help you out?” Laura says, following Melissa out of the office. “You know, we had it bad enough before you came, and now Peter’s taking a week off to drive around town with a teenager and my mom’s climbing his dad like a tree in public and—”

Melissa sighs and stops, just for a few seconds, because she does like Laura. The woman’s a good doctor, when she’s not being obsessed with her family’s reputation, and not all of that is her fault anyway. On the other hand, Melissa has work to do. “Laura, if the problem is what people see Peter and Talia doing, maybe it might be more efficient to tell them to take it into a room?”

Laura stares at her, mouth slightly open, and Melissa pushes on by. Feels a twinge of guilt at it, because that’s another person who’s never going to be happy to see Melissa again. But that’s not a new feeling.

Walking out into the hospital parking lot is a little uncomfortable—not because of the recent fight but because Melissa’s had to change where she parks, since the back lot is still closed, and use the lot closest to the hospital. The lights are brighter than she’s used to, and there are too many cars. And also John’s waiting for her.

“Are we talking again?” Melissa mutters, as soon as she smells him.

John’s leaning against the side of her car, looking at his phone. He doesn’t raise his head but she knows he’s heard her by the way he automatically spreads his shoulders and straightens his feet so he’s braced better. 

Going to be like that, she thinks. Which she knew, she just…she’s tired. She doesn’t have what she was hoping to find, after what Peter got them, and sometimes she does wonder if it’d be better to just drop it. But then…drop it and what, she thinks. Drop it and pray someone else handles it? She’s worked too hard to be that stupid.

Melissa heads down. She’s about three-quarters of the way there when John puts his phone away and looks up, and it’s small comfort to see that he too isn’t enjoying this. With him, that just means he’ll be more determined to see it through.

“I lost it,” she says when they’re standing right across from each other. “Him just going after Scott, letting Scott think he’d take a challenge when it was never going to be fair—I lost it. I know.”

John’s expression doesn’t lighten up. He’s taken the trouble to change out of his uniform, dressed in battered jeans and not even throwing his sheriff’s jacket over his shirt, as if they were taking a shift in the preserve. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

That sends a jolt of frustration through her, which she just tamps down in time. And, she thinks, she doesn’t have to tamp it down. She could just let it flare out into real rage, which is what it wants to do. “Well, they’re out of the way now,” she finally says. “Scott’s all right—so is Stiles.”

At that John leans forward. She stops and waits for him, but he doesn’t say whatever is clearly battering at his thin-pressed lips to get out.

“I’m dealing with the Argents,” Melissa says. She holds John’s gaze for another moment, then reaches into her purse for her keys. If he’s going to show up, after all of the ducking and dodging he’s done, then he can run this damn discussion. She’s been trying to anticipate people all week and her anticipation skills are just worn bone-thin. “Stiles is dealing with the Hales, I’m—”

“No, he’s not,” John says sharply. He elbows himself off the car and moves away from the door, and it’s not a favor to her. “Talia’s up my ass all day about just how many bodies there are and who they all know, and her brother’s going back and forth with Stiles and I don’t even _know_ what you’re doing with the Argents—”

“Well, if you’d called me,” Melissa says.

“When was I going to call you? When you were busy yanking Blackwood’s heart out of his rib cage? You were calling me, telling me to just goddamn run it while you ran around town using a teenage girl as live bait!” John snarls, twisting on his heel to face her. He’s not shifting out, she realizes with a start. His eyes are still plain human, and ferociously angry. “And that guilt trip you laid on _my son_ , like he’s nothing more than Scott’s babysitter, dragging him away from things just to make sure _your_ son doesn’t do anything stupid—if it wasn’t for the fact that he _would_ , I’d be telling you to be a damn mother.”

Melissa just about keeps herself from snapping off the key in the door lock, before she turns around. “Is that what this is going to come down to?” she hisses. “Scott? Because I’ve told you before, I’ll take care—”

John jerks his head aside, but not before she sees how tightly his face has gotten wound up. He spits out a growl, then puts his hand over his eyes and presses down hard, breathing roughly. “Godda—no. No, it’s not about your son,” he says, clipping each word hard. Then he takes his hand down and stares at her. “It’s you, Melissa. You. You’re not—Stiles was calling me and texting me and he was scared to death about Scott after their tangle with Blackwood’s pack, and I couldn’t leave the goddamn station or tell him anything except to wait on _you_.”

“Because I had to—”

“Because you didn’t want to _ask_ anyone to help!” John snarls. “I don’t understand how this is a goddamn pack if we’re good enough to bury things for you but not good enough to keep you from burying—”

“Well, how am I supposed to ask when last time I asked, Claudia ended up dying!” Melissa snarls back. 

Then she staggers, one hand going to press against her breastbone. She feels like somebody’s taken their claws and just raked up all her lungs behind the bone, and they’re bleeding and pushing, trying to force their way out into the free air. She gasps, then tries to make herself slow down her breathing, but in the end she has to put her hands on her knees and just hang her head for a second.

Turning into a werewolf doesn’t cure everything. She’s known that ever since she woke up from the bite, still curled around her swollen belly, disbelieving that it was still there, and had looked up to see the way Rafael had been looking at her from across the room. She just—but being a werewolf makes it easier, in some ways, to just push that to the back of her head. To just push what doesn’t heal down the list of priorities.

“Goddamn it, Melissa,” John says, and when his voice cracks she looks up. He’s slumped against the car again, breathing just as hard as she is. “I told you and told you—you didn’t do that. Claudia made her own choices, and she was—she wanted to help. You didn’t kill her, Rafael did.”

“I know. I know, but I told—I promised you and Stiles,” Melissa says quietly. “I promised he wouldn’t do that to you again.”

John inhales sharply, as if he’s going to lay into her again, and then he turns his head to the side. Chews on his lip, one hand clenching and unclenching against his thigh. He turns back to her, and he looks like he wants to lie down and sleep for days.

“I let you say that because I thought it’d make you feel better,” he mutters. “If I’d really thought—look, Blackwood’s gone, we’ve still got a lead, but now we’ve also got all these people who _know_. We have to slow down and think about this. This part isn’t a fight.”

That’s where he’s wrong, but Melissa can’t work up the energy to push on it. She just nods, and after a moment, he nods back. He goes around to shotgun and she lets him in, and then they drive back to the house.

Scott is waiting to let them into the utility room, freshly-washed towels stuffed under his arm, while Stiles is fussing with two plates of warmed-over sausages and peppers in the kitchen. “Was starting to think we should just go to IKEA and build out your office,” he says, mostly to his father, though his eyes are giving them equal time. “So the Hales finally getting off your back?”

“Talia can wait till tomorrow,” John says, taking one plate. Then he narrows his eyes at Stiles, who’d done something twitchy with a fork. “You know, the best way to keep Peter from one-upping you is to just not start in the first place. They’re cooperating now, you don’t have to be there watching.”

“I’m not. There’s nothing remotely interesting to watch anyway, unless you’re into out-of-context quotes from Locke and I am definitely _not_ into his reading on the ‘law of nature,’” Stiles is saying unconvincingly.

Melissa leaves John to it and walks upstairs with Scott. “Are you going to school tomorrow?” she asks.

Scott winces. “I don’t know…I have all the assignments and I’ll keep up with them.”

“I checked the system and it didn’t have anything in the electronic files. But sometimes that means there are still physical ones that haven’t been scanned yet, so I’m probably going to spend tomorrow in the archives looking for them,” Melissa says. She helps Scott stack the towels in the linen closet and then goes into John’s bedroom. Her clothes that Scott had brought from their rental are still in the bag on the bed, alongside the neatly-folded newly-washed ones. It’s a pretty meager showing, she has to admit. “Going to be a slow day. It’s probably not a good idea to bring you into work, and John’s probably telling Stiles to back off the Hales now—”

“I know what you’re trying to say, Mom, and I think you know what I’m going to say back,” Scott says, smiling wryly. He holds it for a few seconds, then twists up one arm and rubs awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I know I should go, I just…I think Allison might be trying to come back, at least so she can take this chemistry exam we have.”

Melissa frowns at her blouses. “Is she bothering you now, just because we let them stay for dinner?”

“No, she’s not bothering me. She just—I don’t know, I just think it’s going to be a little weird when we see each other in school now,” Scott mutters, not looking at her. He reaches out to help her collect the clothes, then retreats when she bats him off. “Her and Cora.”

“Cora’s coming back too?”

“Yeah, Allison said. She’s getting annoyed with Derek and doesn’t have anything else to do,” Scott says. His scent goes a little odd, nervous without fear. “He’s supposed to be resting up but he’s not listening, and I think Allison and Cora might have had a fight about him.”

“Well, that’s not really anything to do with you,” Melissa says, and then looks over in time to catch her son wince. “Baby, you really can’t let it be about you. Whatever that’s about, you’re not going to be there for it. You can’t let them make you into what they want—they don’t even know you.”

“I know, I know, I just—” Scott chews and chews on it, and finally can’t keep it in “—I really wish I knew how Derek was doing. I—he was okay when he left, I didn’t smell anything, but I just—I wasn’t very—”

Melissa bites back her first reply, which is that her son didn’t and doesn’t have to be nice to a boy who stalked him for no reason. She can understand Allison, who’d really had no idea about her grandfather’s involvement—and when she had been told, the girl hadn’t panicked but had done exactly what Melissa had said—but not Derek, who must have had plenty of warnings through Talia or Peter that something wasn’t right. Laura had said her brother wanted to get out of the family shadow just as much, but he really didn’t seem to be doing anything to make that happen.

“Did Allison say anything about him?” she tries instead. Which is a little cruel of her, knowing what she knows, but sometimes Scott needs his instinct to forgive to run into those sharp reminders.

“Yeah. Yeah, she said he was fine,” Scott says, in a way that tells Melissa a lot more is being left out. Then again, Melissa’s not that fond of how Allison’s now stepping up, after finding out about things. “And, um, that he wouldn’t kill me if we ran into each other. You know, since they’re both going to go to the physical therapist at the hospital.”

“Why would he need therapy? I thought he wasn’t in the fight much,” Melissa says, frowning.

Scott blushes. “I didn’t think he would—and he walked out of the house fine, like I said, but Allison said that and…and I’m not sure now. I just—I know I need to stop hanging out with both of them, but I just don’t think I left it in a good place, Mom. And they’ve been through a lot and I just think it’s the least I can do.”

He’s starting to get his mind made up. Once he has, Melissa knows how hard it is to swerve him, so she doesn’t try to disagree directly with him. “I think maybe you should just make sure you know how you’re going to do it this time,” she finally says. “You went through a lot too, and it’s only been a few days. You can stay home if you want, but just make sure it’s getting what you need done, done. All right?”

“Yeah, okay, that makes sense,” Scott says. He takes a step towards the door, then turns back. “I can get some shopping done—we really are low on groceries, and I got all the clothes I could find, but…”

“But I’ve been just running through them,” Melissa mutters. She moves around what she has in one of John’s drawers, then sighs. “All right, let’s do this. I should get all the files pulled in the morning, so I’ll come back and we’ll have lunch, and then we’ll go buy some clothes. Okay?”

“Okay,” Scott says, sounding happier than he has in days. Some things, at least, are that easy.

* * *

The next day, Melissa heads into the hospital with a sense of purpose. She might not have everything pinned down, but they are almost there. She can feel it, a tactile thing, pressing into her hands after so many years of reaching out into the emptiness.

Laura’s on duty and Melissa passes her on the way to the morgue. The other woman starts to turn around, then stops and lifts her chin instead, watching Melissa with stony eyes. She’s obvious enough that one of the nurses who has a regular shift near Melissa’s office asks about it, and Melissa has to make up something about high school drama involving Cora and Scott. Not that hard these days, just…another thing to do.

Melissa checks into the office long enough to talk to her team and ward off their curiosity with shaky smiles, and then she heads into the records room. She’s hoping that any paper files are still on the premises and haven’t been sent to off-site storage; going by the dates, they shouldn’t have been, but she’d figured out on her first trip down that somebody had been manipulating that to their advantage. Or maybe multiple people.

She should bring that up to Laura sometime, she thinks, and then gives herself a shake—as long as it has nothing to do with Rafael, and given the time-span, she doesn’t think it does, she’s not going to make it her business. All she wants is the damn files to prove that one, her ex really did come to Beacon Hills, and two, that he never left. 

She finds them.

An hour and a half into her search, her hands starting to flinch by themselves from the endless paper cuts, she pulls out a report showing receipt of a man matching his description. No photo, of course there’s no photo, she thinks irritably, paging through it. She’s a little too quick and her finger slivers on the page. Blood wells up and she jerks her hand back, not wanting to spot the pages, and then she paws frantically at the file, finally pinning it against her side, to keep the sheets from fluttering all over the place.

Swallowing curses, Melissa ends up squatting down on the floor so she can spread the file over her knees. She checks that her finger’s healed, then wipes the spit off on her arm and picks up the folder again.

He didn’t give his real name, but when she turns to the section that describes his personal effects, there’s a picture of her. Faded and crumpled, even before you add in the bad quality of the scan and how it’s black and white, so even more detail is lost. But she can recognize herself, all right. 

“That son of a _bitch_ ,” Melissa finally says, the words cramming up against each other by the roof of her mouth so that they come out all squeezed on top of each other.

She should feel relieved, she thinks. Instead she just feels angry.

Melissa’s not sure how long she’s there, staring at it, but it’s too long. Eventually she pulls herself together and slaps the file together, then walks out of the room. She goes by the copier without pausing—usually she’d make a copy and bring that up, but enough other people have messed with the files in this hospital. One of them can take the blame for missing this one.

She’s not in a good mindset, she knows. She didn’t make it to the end of the file and she needs to, needs to see that there was a death certificate, a release of the body. If she wants to be _sure_ , she needs to be standing on top of the grave. She knows that, and knows that this isn’t over yet and she can’t lose her nerve now. But she’s angry and she just thinks that she needs to get out of that stuffy room before she just punches all the shelves to pieces.

So she doesn’t notice who’s in her office till she’s already walked by Chris and Laura and has slapped the folder down on the desk, and Laura gives a little gasp. 

In a second Melissa’s on the other side of the desk, not so much for the barrier as so she can get both hands wrapped around its edge to lift. Which, says Laura’s huge wide eyes, is not necessary.

“Melissa,” Chris says from next to Laura’s. He’s spun half around, arms pulled tight back against his sides, and the angle doesn’t look awkward to someone who’s used to seeing people trying to grab for something holstered when their hands are full. But he eases his arms out in front of him, lowering the box between them onto a table, keeping eyes locked with Melissa. “Hi. I…know I’m not expected, but I called your house and Scott said you weren’t home, and I…”

“I told him,” Laura says in a tight, brittle voice. Her eyes flick up and down between Melissa’s face and her hands. “Are you seriously going to go werewolf on us in the middle of the hospital? I thought you all were trying to hide that kind of thing.”

“You start sounding like the rest of your family when you’re mad at someone, you know,” Melissa says. She lets go of the desk and then takes the folder out from under her arm. “You two are talking?”

Chris looks as if he would have been happier lying about that. “I ran into her at the front and she asked if I was looking for you,” he says, shrugging. “She was trying to tell me you hadn’t come in and we were talking about whether it was a good idea to leave this here for you, or if I needed to take it over to your house.”

‘This’ being the box he has. “If it’s got werewolf stuff, then I don’t think it should be here,” Laura says, still stiff. “There are sick people and babies here.”

“Laura, it’s not like we have the bubonic plague,” Melissa says. She has an idea about what the box might have, given the source, and confirming it is probably the last thing she should be doing, if she wants to keep her temper. But they’re in her office and not going to leave and even if they did, it’s not as if she’s going to not touch the box. So she sighs and goes around the desk. “And if Gerard Argent had them, he should’ve known enough to keep them stored properly. If you didn’t unwrap anything, they should be fine.”

Laura jerks her head around and looks at Chris, who sucks his breath a little, uncertain, but not so fearful that Melissa thinks he meddled and now is going to lie about it. “I didn’t actually—” he starts, tucking the box more closely towards him. Then he grimaces and gives it a nudge towards Melissa. “I was wondering about that kind of thing, since I don’t know. It’s all up in Washington anyway, but I just thought—we have copies of the inventory the executor made up.”

Paper. Melissa pauses, then pivots around so she can slide onto the couch, across the table from them. More paper. That she can deal with. “What kind of executor did you get that you could figure out what I was talking about just from that?” she mutters, pulling the box towards her. “You know, I told Victoria I wasn’t in a huge rush.”

“Yeah, she let me know, but it just…it didn’t feel…anyway, we had this in the house and it wasn’t that hard to go through it,” Chris says. He steps back, bumps into a chair and then puts one hand on it to move it a few inches. “Peter’s firm handled it.”

“And that partner you said your ex was working with, he’s the one who did the will for Gerard in the first place,” Laura says. She’s not following everything that Chris and Melissa are talking about and she smells frustrated about it. “So Peter took another look at it and made some guesses. And your partner gave Mom a few clues.”

Melissa frowns and starts to ask, and then realizes what Laura’s talking about. “You mean John?”

“Yeah,” Laura says, so curtly that Melissa didn’t need the spike of anger-scent to tip her off. The other woman rocks on her heels, arms folded across her chest, and then abruptly throws herself into the other chair. “Listen, it’s one thing to fuck around with my family when you’re actually trying to look for something, but now we’re giving you what you want and you’re still—”

“ _Listen_ ,” Melissa says pointedly. Then she opens the box. “If your mother is fucking John, and I’m putting it that way on purpose, then I can’t really help you with that. And if you want to waste your time complaining—”

“Complaining, are you—you’re after my family!” Laura cries.

Papers is as much as Melissa gets to see before she looks up, rolling her eyes. “I am not after them. I’m actually trying to avoid them, and if you worked as hard at actually trying to _talk_ to them instead of trying to shove in their faces all the time how much you don’t like them and wish they were different people, maybe they would _talk back_. Okay?”

Laura stares. Occasionally her jaw makes an effort to pull back up, but it never quite makes it there. Until Chris, deeply uncomfortable and looking over both their heads, flexes his hand on his chair and the cheap plasticized cover creaks, and Laura shuts her mouth with a click. Then winces, even though that shouldn’t have been hard enough to hurt.

Her mother should be doing this, Melissa thinks, annoyed, and bends over the box again.

“I just—you don’t know what people say about us,” Laura says suddenly.

“Actually, I do, in a lot of detail, and you know, if your mom wants to stay put, I think she’s probably going about it the right way. You can’t get people to forgive you, especially when they don’t even have any skin in the game anyway. If you don’t want to end up begging them all the time, and I don’t actually think you do,” Melissa says, sighing. She really shouldn’t care, but Laura just sounds so desperately young sometimes. “Otherwise you wouldn’t defend your family so much.”

That finally shuts Laura up. Melissa gives her a good five seconds, and when she just looks at Melissa as if the werewolf revelation had happened all over again, Melissa finally turns back to the box. 

As promised, it contains binders full of neatly-typed pages. Here and there Chris has marked out something with a Post-It—or Peter, with Stiles whiffing off one or two of the notes. Melissa wonders if she needs to mention that to John, given where last night’s talk had seemed to be going, but then again, she can’t tell from scent alone whether this happened before or after that.

“Peter said,” Chris starts, and then ducks his head when Melissa’s fingers slip on the page. “Sorry.”

“What did he say?” Melissa says, swallowing her irritation. She doesn’t really want to look at this.

Chris blinks, surprised, and then pushes his chair over a few more inches so he can come stand right up against the table. He looks like he’d be more comfortable sitting down, but clearly isn’t sure if that’s allowed. “He said that if you look at…”

The lights flicker. Laura starts up, grabbing at her knees, while Chris looks sharply at the nearest set of bulbs. They do that sometimes, when the hospital’s running too many of the heavy diagnostic machines at once, and Melissa’s learned to ignore it. But something raises the hairs on the back of her neck, and then she looks over at her desk, for no reason at all, and is just in time to see a breeze sweep the file open.

Two pages come soaring out of the folder, zipping towards the door. Chris pivots on his heel and stretches out one arm and grabs both of them, then steps back and glances down at them. Then over at Melissa. 

He’s going to ask her something, but she doesn’t find out what it is because she’s jumping over the table. His eyes widen and he throws his forearm across his body; she grabs him by that and spins him around Laura’s chair so that she’s between them and the giant shadow that’s suddenly appeared on the wall.

“What is—” Laura gasps, and the shadow vanishes.

Melissa takes the papers from Chris, gives them one look, and then crumples them up, cursing under her breath. They’re the pages she hadn’t gotten around to reading, and they have spellwork scrawled on them. “Laura, get up and walk with us.”

Thankfully, Laura does that, without protesting. They shuffle over to Melissa’s purse, where she digs out some all-purpose charms and hands them to Chris, who immediately passes them to Laura. Then he twists his arm in Melissa’s grip, but he’s not trying to get loose. When he has her attention, he points his chin at the door to the morgue. 

“Saw something in there,” he mutters.

Melissa checks the time on her phone. “Lunch break, everyone should be out,” she says. “Lock the door on your way out and make sure nobody comes down here till I say.”

She slips her phone into her pocket but leaves the rest of her things in her office as she crosses to the door. The protections on the office should be enough to keep anything from breaking in this way, but the morgue has two other exits. The one to the service ramp, she’s not so worried about because it’s got good cold steel bars on it when they aren’t backing up an ambulance, but the other one is just a regular door to the rest of the hospital. She has to deal with that one.

When she walks into the room, it’s cool and quiet and empty, just a wall of drawers facing her. They haven’t brought in any of the bodies from the fight with the Blackwood pack, and it’s actually been a pretty slow week at the hospital. She knows which drawers are full and which aren’t, and knows the cause of death of every body in there. She knows where all the dead werewolves in this town are. Except for Rafael.

“What are you looking for?” Chris asks.

Melissa grabs him and only realizes how hard when he hisses in pain. She loosens up, but doesn’t let go; she’s mad at herself for tuning out that bad twice in one day, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to let him off the hook. “I told you to leave,” she says, yanking him with her. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re _trying_ to get involved.”

“Well, that’s because I am,” Chris grunts. He doesn’t try to get in the way as she goes to the other door and makes sure it locks. “I can get why you might be suspicious, but I’m not my father. Whatever he did, I want to—”

“It’s not even your father, it’s just you jumping in like you have any idea what can kill you. And don’t give me some line about being sure I’ll keep that from happening, because that’s not my job,” Melissa says. She gives the room another sweeping look, then turns them around and pulls them back towards her office. “And your wife bringing us food all the time, like some demented housewife—you know about that, don’t you?”

Chris is mostly busy trying not to wince, but somehow he gets a little amusement into his voice. “Victoria and I talk, yeah. She was really torn about whether to bring the deer sausage or the duck. I’m big on the duck myself, but it’s on the fatty side.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Melissa snaps. She shoves Chris into the office, ignoring the way he stumbles and then grabs onto a nearby file cabinet, and turns around to lock up. “I’m not sure what I did to make you two feel that cocky, but let me just get this and I’ll fix that.”

“What, no, that’s not what I…shit.” Chris bumps up against her legs, then pulls away as he straightens up. “Shit. Look, we’re not trying to make fun of you, and I’m sorry if we come off like idiots. I know we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re trying to figure out how to help.”

Melissa stops with the key just outside of the lock. “Help.”

When she looks over, Chris is frowning back at her as if the idea should be perfectly clear. “Yeah, help you out,” he says. He hesitates, then pushes a little closer. “You did save—”

That shadow comes up behind him again. Melissa grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him towards her, only to have Chris fall backwards, away from her. She snarls and sees the red of her eyes reflected in the whites of his—they’re that close for a second, as she claws after him. And then she’s dragged into the morgue.

The lights go out at the same time. Of course they do, this always—she sinks her claws into the floor, promptly has two rip out, but grits through the pain till she figures she’s hit the midpoint of the room. Then she lets go.

Body or no body, opponents usually can’t roll with the momentum. This one is no different, bowling over with a minimum of blows that actually hit home. They help tell her that it’s got claws at least as long as her own, and solid flesh that bleeds—then she’s rolling off and she’s throwing herself into that momentum, trying to get to the other side of the room where all the supplies are racked. 

She gets to a table and swings it into the thing, just as claws rake across her leg, then hikes herself up and grabs for the shelves. Too hard—they start to teeter and she swears, then dodges around them in hopes that she can at least get them to fall on her attacker and not on herself.

Melissa guesses wrong, and takes a glancing blow to the side from the shelves. The corner catches her—they’re metal—and she smells her own blood. She twists to the side, kicking at boxes of gloves as they patter down on her, and then gasps, clutching at the thing that’s just wrapped around her throat.

She rises into the air, despite sinking the claws of her hands and then her feet into her attacker. A snake, she thinks, the world greying in and out. A boa constrictor, except how—she looks down, into a scaly, reptilian face. 

The kanima rears up, forked tongue flicking out at her, jaws gaping disturbingly wide. Her head could easily fit between its needle-sharp fangs, and—its neck muscles are flaring, it’s going to spit at her, she realizes, and she rakes her claws over and over its tail, remembering about the venom—

A bang from the side of the room makes the kanima start. It swings around, nearly bashing Melissa into the wall, and hisses violently at the—the door. Chris is at the door, trying to bang through the glass insert with something. A chair. Something.

Melissa sucks in the little air she can get, then kicks blindly backward. One foot sticks on the wall, and with that leverage she manages to twist just enough to hook another set of shelves with her free foot. She sends it crashing down at the kanima, who’s just startled enough that she manages to yank her head out from its coiled tail.

Still gasping, she rolls away. Grabs at whatever’s in reach—metal struts, pieces of glass, paper boxes—and throws them at the kanima. Nuisance-level stuff, but it keeps the kanima at bay long enough for her to scrabble through the wreckage and find the epipens. She grabs them up, then has to jump away as the kanima tries to lunge at her.

More glass breaks. She glances over—Chris has the insert fractured but not broken through—and then swerves sharply, losing her footing on the slippery floor, as the kanima comes at her again. Melissa flings two of the epipens at the kanima’s face and the thing snaps instinctively at them, then spits them out. Its head comes back up and she slides herself back to the other wall, trying to gauge how tight the angle between it, her, and the other doors are.

The kanima suddenly convulses, jerking its head up and down as if it’s choking on something. Melissa sucks in her breath, hoping, and then looks down at the remaining epipens. “Oh, damn—” she starts, seeing that the one with the all-purpose venom is still in her hand.

Kanima leaps at her. She snaps the epipen’s cap off and gets her hands and feet up, putting all of her claws between herself and the kanima in hopes of a Hail Mary stab. The door to her office bursts open and a wild-eyed Stiles comes windmilling into the room.

“Hey!” he shouts, and the kanima swivels to look at him. Stiles’ eyes widen further. “Oh—seriously, a kanima—”

The kanima drops to all fours and arches its neck and hisses. Then lets out a high, keening cry, twisting over onto its side, as Melissa takes advantage of the moment to rush forward and stab the epipen into its tail.

“Have to be _kidding_ me,” Stiles grunts, already leaping forward to grab one of the kanima’s limbs. He ducks its swipe, then wrenches it around so that it spins in a half-circle on the floor. “Oh, _shit_ , sorry—”

That’s a rib, Melissa thinks as something in her side _snaps_ after the kanima’s tail sweeps her off her knees. She curls up on herself, gasping through the healing burn, and then chokes on a warning as the kanima suddenly flings Stiles off, sending him crashing into the wall. Sure, it staggers right afterward, but the damn venom’s not acting quickly enough. Her lungs still feel like they’re filled with coals but Melissa lurches up onto one knee and roars to get the kanima looking at her again.

Its head swings around and then Stiles snarls loudly, making it look the other way. The kanima snaps its jaws, swaying in place. Then jerks up sharply as Derek Hale blows the contents of a fire extinguisher in its face. The kanima screams and lurches backward, whipping its head back and forth in an effort to avoid the spray, and then Melissa sees its hind legs bunching for a leap—

Stiles jumps onto its back, then rides down the kanima’s body down as it crashes to the ground. Derek yanks the fire extinguisher’s nozzle to the side, cursing, and then gets dragged back by Chris and his sister as the kanima’s thrashing tail nearly takes off his head. Melissa has to scramble to avoid it too, and then manages to work up enough energy to grab hold of it and pin it to the ground.

“A kanima,” Stiles pants. He growls sharply as the thing under him bucks up, then takes its head in both hands and slams it crisply against the floor. “Ugh. A _kanima_. Gotta give Gerard points for going all the way.”

“What?” Chris says. He’s edging up, staring at the kanima, with a broken chair-leg in his hand. 

“It’s this—this brainwashed mindless soldier thing—use it to guard stuff. Like if you kill somebody, and don’t want their body to be found, because its—favorite sin’s murder and—” Stiles is trying to twist its head “—goddamn it why do you have to have such tough _skin_ —”

Chris pulls a gun out from under his coat and fires point-blank into the kanima’s eye. The kanima jerks once, then goes limp.

“Okay,” Stiles says after a moment. He rocks back onto his heels and gives the kanima’s head a tap. “So. Um. This thing does heal, so unless those bullets happened to have this really rare compound made out of a plant that’s native to one tiny corner of the Amazonian rainforest—”

“But if I keep shooting it, it has to keep starting over with regrowing its brain, right?” Chris says. When Stiles gives him a bemused nod, he lowers the gun but keeps it aimed at the kanima. “I have a whole spare clip.”

“Great, good to know we’ve got a plan for this thing,” Laura says. She wipes her hand over her face, then looks at Derek, who’s setting the fire extinguisher down. “What the hell took you so long? I texted you like thirty minutes ago she was here.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Peter said he was onto something, he was getting all pissy and Stiles just wanted to argue about it and—”

“Wait a second, excuse me?” Stiles snaps. “Did you _know_ —”

“No, we didn’t know there was a giant killer lizard thing involved! We didn’t even know those things existed!” Derek snaps. “Up till Laura called the second time we just thought she was hiding things, because your _dad_ said that to my mom—” 

“Is your mother just using me to find out what Melissa was doing?” Chris says to Laura. “I can’t believe you—we told you people we didn’t want to—”

“I don’t give a shit what Mom or Peter are up to, or _you_ , I just wanted somebody to _talk_ to her,” Laura says, from somewhere very near Melissa. “She’s not even trying to…Melissa? Melissa?”

Someone grabs Melissa by the shoulders and hauls her up, while another person breathes in her face. She wishes they wouldn’t; it’s heavy and sticky and smells like sour-cream-and-onion chips.

“Melissa?” Chris says sharply. “She’s breathing, but why are her eyes like—they’re not focusing—”

“She’s paralyzed. Damn, the kanima must have gotten her—okay, you’re gonna _calm_ down or I’m gonna slap you off her and Derek’ll lock you in one of those drawers while we get her out,” Stiles says.

“I’m not doing anything,” Derek snaps. “I don’t like you.”

Stiles sighs. “So helpful. Okay, look, she’s stable, she just needs to sleep it off and we need to get her out of here before people come in to see what all the noise was.”

“Sleep it off?” Chris says. “Are you serious?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Victoria was really, really irritating to me in the show, as an example of how you can't just characterize somebody as "strong" by having people say that about her and leave it at that. She clearly doesn't like Gerard but when he wants to take over the school, she's right there with electrocuting the old principal and doesn't appear to do anything to try to undercut him, she doesn't appear to have Chris' issues with killing teenagers, she'd rather leave her daughter with a huge homicidal guilt complex than, I don't know, write a note. We honestly don't get a lot of moments with her that show any true complexity beyond psycho helicopter mom. Which is annoying. Chris seems to respect her a lot, I do like seeing that type of marriage portrayed, but in practice their relationship is really not depicted as between equals.
> 
> So this also is reworking Victoria. And I just like using food scenes as characterization props in my stories.
> 
> Given Melissa works in a hospital, she'd have a pretty easy time hiding things in plain sight. You could empty out an epipen and refill it with all sorts of things useful in a fight with the supernatural, rather than just brawling.
> 
> I know Chris shoots kanima!Jackson a bunch on the show with no effect, but here he's one, shooting it after Melissa shot it up with weakening venom, and two, shooting it in the eye. Brain tissue healing should be more complicated (and therefore take longer) than other body parts, since it's not just a matter of regrowing brain cells. They also have to hook back up again.


	5. Chapter 5

Chris and Laura take Melissa home. At some point Melissa drifts off—she knows the fight’s over and knows somebody’s trying to take care of her, and she is _tired_ —but she rouses again when Scott’s laying her in the bathtub. “Hang on, Mom,” he says, moving her legs. “Sorry, I just have to get the epipen, I left it in the other room, but let me get you comfortable first.”

Melissa grunts and twitches her toes. She’s getting feeling back, and can move her head a little, though not enough to get the hair out of her eyes so she can see her son’s face. 

“No, it’s okay,” Scott says, smelling absolutely not okay. “Stiles’ dad is over at the hospital and Stiles figured out the spell Gerard used to call up the kanima, they’re all over it. They’ve got it under control.”

He leaves for a few seconds, then comes back and kneels by the tub. She can hear his breathing change, slowing down as he unwraps the epipen, snorting at the bitter aroma of the Nine Herbs in it, and then speeding up again as he leans over her. He puts his hand on her arm to move it into a better position and it’s trembling. 

“Stiles said he’d figure out whatever you found in the hospital records too,” Scott says instead of injecting her. “He says it’s actually going really fast with Peter’s help—Peter’s good at figuring out this kind of thing, and we should—should—” he sucks in a shaky breath “—sorry, Mom, shouldn’t put it off. I just hate seeing you—okay, one, two, three—”

The needle goes in. Then there’s fire in Melissa’s veins and storming through her head, and she’s barely aware that her son is the one holding her down, that it’s his throat her fangs are trying to arch towards, and.

And she’s herself again. Cold, sticky, limp arm over Scott’s back as he slumps over her, crying silently into her shoulder.

“Baby,” Melissa mumbles. Grimaces at the way she sounds, and then makes her hand flop up till she can at least feel his hair. “Baby, ‘m okay.”

“I—I know but I—I’m—I’m _not_ ,” Scott scratches out. He pushes himself up and wipes roughly at his face, and then doesn’t look at her. “I’m not, Mom, I’m not, I can’t—I know this isn’t what you want but I can’t just watch you keep doing this. I can’t. I can’t figure out how to help you—I know you don’t want me to but I can’t help it, you’re my mom, but I can’t do it and I can’t—I’m sorry, I can’t.”

Then he’s off her. He makes a wet, nasal noise, standing by the tub, and then he walks out of the bathroom.

* * *

Melissa lies there in the bathtub for God knows how long. She knows Scott doesn’t leave the house. She can track his heartbeat and he moves around from room to room for the longest time before he finally stops in one of the bedrooms. He’s in there with two other people and she has no idea who they are if John is still at the hospital and she should worry about that, she thinks. If she was a normal mother, she would.

She should have called somebody, she thinks. Or looked all the way through to the end of the file before she’d pulled it. She knows how magic works, she knows enough to avoid those kinds of traps. She just…didn’t.

Maybe her ex is dead, but even seeing his body isn’t going to settle things. She’s been pretty stupid to think so.

“…oh, here, maybe there’s something under the sink,” comes a voice from the hall. Victoria—why is Victoria here? “They have to have bandages, at least.”

“Well, if they heal the way they do?” Chris says, smelling and sounding as if he’s wincing with every step. “You know, it’s not that bad.”

Victoria doesn’t say anything, but there’s a scuffle and Chris grunts hard and then the toilet seat rattles as someone sits on it. “You always say that, I don’t even know why you bother,” Victoria mutters, opening the sink cabinet. She’s not moving naturally either, but she sounds more limber than Chris. “You know exactly how much I believe you.”

Chris laughs quietly. It’s an easy, affectionate laugh, all familiarity and reassurance. “Fine, if it makes you feel better.”

“It does make me feel better…oh, they have an entire first-aid kit here.” Small plastic clicks as Victoria opens it, and then rustling. “Nothing’s been opened. It’s all still in the original packaging.”

“You should get off that leg,” Chris says, not demanding, just observing. “The blood’s coming through the gauze.”

Victoria makes an annoyed sound as she rips open things. “That’s from this morning, it’s dried already. I’ve done worse shaving.”

“Now you’re asking _me_ to believe,” Chris mutters, but then he switches to a series of gasps and hitches and bitten-off noises. 

Victoria mostly seems to ignore it, just asking Chris to move his arm this way and that, but at one point he drags in a breath so long that Victoria makes a quiet, concerned sound. Then they’re both wordless, just breathing.

“She doesn’t know her own strength,” Victoria finally says.

“I think she does,” Chris mutters. He hisses again, and Melissa can hear the pop of his spine as he moves. “She threw those shelves around too, and they ended up looking like pretzels…”

“Oh, you don’t need to defend her. You know what I think,” Victoria mutters. She does something right then that makes Chris grunt, and then she gasps as they move against each other, and…

Melissa sighs and sits up. And then waits for them to settle down, after Chris yelps and falls off the toilet and over Victoria’s knees, so that she knocks into the far wall. Melissa’s own head is still swimming, and she’s not quite sure that if she stands up, she’ll be able to manage her balance—she’s been hitting the Nine Herbs too often lately, her body is starting to forget how to bounce back on its own.

Chris settles down first, putting his arm back to help Victoria up as the two of them stare at Melissa. He has his shirt off, with a huge mass of bruising running from his left shoulder down into the waistband of his jeans. Here and there the bruises have swollen enough to split, and the raw lines are glistening with antiseptic. Victoria’s skirt is hiked up over her knees to show the bandages wrapped around them, while her blouse is pulled down over one shoulder so the cup of a lacy pink bra is visible. “Are you all right?” he says, his eyes flicking all over Melissa. “Scott said you were—”

“Sleeping it off, right,” Melissa mutters. She rubs one hand across her face, then grimaces at the scum that comes off on her fingertips. Her top’s gone, probably fallen to rags in the fight, and her bra is all bent out of shape from the times she shifted during the fight. “I’m fine. This just—we take something sometimes, to heal faster, and this is just what it looks like. I just need to…”

She starts to turn and Victoria moves as if she’s going to roll forward onto her knees. Then stops as Melissa jerks back around, Chris tensing beside her. Victoria presses her lips together, as if annoyed, but she smells more nervous. After a moment, she raises her hands. “Can I get you the shampoo?”

“What?” Melissa says. And then, when it looks like Victoria is actually going to explain, she twists completely around and stares at them. “No, okay, what—what _is_ this? This—the food and bringing me things and asking me how to help and—”

“Because that’s what we’re trying to do,” Chris says, frowning. He’s more confused than frustrated, though there’s enough force in his voice to make it clear he’s not confused about what _he_ means. “You asked for your things back that my father took, and it’s not that much seeing as you saved our lives—saved mine twice—and my father’s responsible for a lot of this, and—”

“Your _lives_ wouldn’t be in danger if I wasn’t in town,” Melissa spits out.

“They would, you said there are people coming after what Gerard did,” Victoria says.

“Well, it wouldn’t be the same way!” Melissa snaps.

“Why are you so angry at being helped?” Victoria says sharply. Chris looks at her and she puts her hand on his knee, then uses it to push past him to sit up right by the tub. “Didn’t you want something from us to begin with? Scott was trying to be friends with Allison—it started out that way, I’m only saying that. We told you we wouldn’t go after your son—I just want to know why you’re so surprised that we’re trying to give you what you’re looking for.”

Accusations. That Melissa can deal with. “You’re not giving me what I’m looking for,” she snaps.

Victoria’s eyes go hard enough that Melissa can see the sparks where her words glance off. She breathes in and is going to go off on Melissa—and then Chris wraps his hand around her wrist. She looks back at him, annoyed, and he tilts his head and she makes a face and then they both sigh.

“Cute,” Melissa says, as if it is really that and not something that scrapes at old scars to see. She and John, they know each other, but they…just never have been that. She’s never had that.

“You think?” Chris says, brows rising.

For a second she looks at him and he looks back, deadpan. The flutter of his pulse gives him away, makes her stare at him incredulous. “You can’t be serious,” Melissa finally says.

“Well, would you find that easier to swallow?” Victoria says. She’s still fighting back the urge to go after Melissa, it’s in the way her expression won’t quite settle, the snap that keeps sneaking into her voice. But under that, she’s curious—and she thinks she’s spotted something. “What is it you want anyway? I thought you were looking for your ex-husband, to make sure he’s really dead. Is that not what you want?”

Who told her—did Melissa tell her? Or did someone else? They’re talking with the Hales, and now even Stiles—Stiles was trying to work with them, not her, and for a moment Melissa doesn’t know who knows what anymore, and doesn’t know who she’s talked to, who she can talk to. She doesn’t know—and then she remembers Scott, and what he’d said, crying over her, and she closes her eyes and thinks that everything is in pieces and that’s why it doesn’t make sense anymore.

“Melissa—”

Victoria is very still, staring into her face, as Melissa holds the hand that had been about to touch her. “I’m,” Melissa starts, and then can’t finish. 

When she breathes, the air comes in a huge ragged gulp; just beyond Victoria she can sense Chris moving uncertainly, one hand hovering as if he might try to reach for Melissa himself. Even though she’s stronger and he knows that, and he’s still able to think like that. 

“Melissa,” Victoria says quietly. Her wrist is tense in Melissa’s grip, but then she takes a deep breath and moves it. Forward, which Melissa doesn’t resist, until she’s just touching Melissa’s hair. She pauses, then strokes a few strands away from where they’d stuck to Melissa’s brow. “What—”

“You know, he didn’t want Scott at first. He bit me when I was pregnant with him,” Melissa says abruptly. She stares away from the other woman, down at the oily smears on the tub. “That’s how werewolves get made. One way. The other—Scott was born this way, and then Rafael thought that was—a compliment, to him. But then when Scott was older—so we kicked out my ex. But he came back, so we did it again, and he came back _again_ so we killed him, except he’d gotten some damn charm to bring himself back and then he was following us around and—we fought back enough, he ran away to regroup. We think. But we need to know. _I_ need to know. I need to get it _right_ —”

“He got that charm from my father, right?” Chris interrupts. He’s moved up next to Victoria, who gives him an annoyed look. His eyes are on Melissa. “And that’s why he came back here, to find another one? Or to get in touch with my father?”

Melissa shrugs. “Something like that, I guess. I don’t—you know you don’t owe me, right? I’m not like Rafael, I don’t call up debts like that. Besides—we’re probably even. I’ve done things with you, with your daughter—you don’t even know what I’ve done.”

The mention of Allison makes both Chris and Victoria’s heartbeats skip. Chris sits back and looks at Victoria, lips pressed tight together, and Melissa thinks _finally, they’re going to start making sense._

“It doesn’t look like we’re dead,” Chris says. He looks back at Melissa. “You keep looking at us like we’re insane, and I want to know why you think it’s insane to want to do better by people than a man who tried to kidnap his own family.”

Victoria sucks in her breath, fingers curling back from Melissa’s face as she turns to Chris.

“It’s just as far as I can tell, all we’ve done is yell at you about your son, but the first time somebody tried to kill us, you got in the middle of it,” Chris goes on, though his eyes twitch to the side, almost looking over at his wife.

“They were more after me,” Melissa says.

“Well, they didn’t look like they minded if they got us too,” Chris says stubbornly.

For a second Melissa just…cannot believe this. But Chris is going to keep on with this, she can tell, and she has to get something out there. “Look, all right? I’m not—whatever you think this is, it isn’t that. I’m a werewolf, and so’s my son, and we’ve been hunting my ex-husband for over five years and when I find him I’m going to kill him. Kill him. He’s—he’s killed John’s wife, killed other packmates—tried his damnedest to get me and Scott killed and I’m going to pay him right back. I don’t _care_ about anything else, can you get that through your head?”

“All right,” Victoria says. When Chris starts to talk over her, she puts her hand up and he quiets down. “All right, all right. If you just understand that _we’re_ grateful for you.”

Melissa stares at them. Tries to say something, but it’s just so—it’s just so ridiculous—she makes some bizarre croaking noise and looks away. She thinks she’s just going to turn around and ignore them, except then the world gets blurry and she thinks she might be fainting. Too much Nine Herbs or killing—she puts her hand against the wall to steady herself and the world is still blurry. And then she blinks, and her eyes sting, and she realizes what’s really going on.

“Chris, I think we need another towel in here,” Victoria says quietly.

There’s a lag and then he gets up and walks out of the room. Melissa grimaces into her hand, trying to wipe her eyes clear, and then starts getting up onto her feet. She misjudges where the soap dish is jutting out of the wall and bangs her knee against it and doubles over again, cursing. Then freezes.

Victoria goes still too, her hand barely touching Melissa’s shoulder. Then she takes a deep breath and curls her fingers around Melissa’s shoulder, and uses the hold to swing Melissa slightly to the side, out of the way of the dish to lean against the wall. “Here’s the shampoo,” she says, pressing something hard and tubular into Melissa’s hand. 

Melissa looks down. Bottle, and her thumb automatically moves to depress the top. Then she starts as the shower turns on. In the tight space she runs into Victoria, who hisses and reaches for her leg—then grabs Melissa’s arm when Melissa teeters, still off-balance.

The other woman helps Melissa up under the spray, and then with washing out her hair. “You’re getting soaked,” Melissa points out, when Victoria reaches for the conditioner.

“True,” Victoria says, and then she shimmies out of her skirt and stands there in her blouse and underwear and soaked bandages.

When they get to the soap, Melissa’s recovered enough to do that herself. She strips out of her clothes—she really _needed_ that shopping trip with Scott, she thinks, and then she starts to giggle. She gets her pubic area rinsed down and drops the soap in its dish, still choking back her snickers, and tries to step out of the shower. Stumbles a little. Not much, just enough for Victoria to take it seriously and grab at her again, and at that point Melissa flat-out laughs. Just puts her head down and lets the other woman steer her to a semi-sitting, semi-leaning position on the floor, and laughs till she’s crying again.

“Oh, my God,” Melissa mumbles. Something soft’s pressing into her mouth—Victoria’s shoulder. She reaches up to push the other woman away, and then just loses the energy to deal. Just—that’s it, she just can’t deal anymore. “Oh, my God. I can’t even…”

“Mel—should we get Scott?” Chris whispers, having come back at some point.

“What? No—God, no, don’t get him, he’s seen me enough—poor kid. I mean, his father’s a psycho and his mother’s not that far off either. I don’t know where he gets his thing about caring for everybody, because—God knows it’s not _me_ ,” Melissa says. She should at least get off Victoria’s shoulder, she thinks.

She doesn’t. Victoria doesn’t make her get off either, and Chris just sits down with them, tucking a towel around Melissa’s shoulders. He puts a hand on Melissa’s back, just next to one of the shoulderblades, while Victoria basically wraps herself around Melissa’s side. Doesn’t speak and doesn’t hum—which would have just started Melissa laughing again. Silence is better. Silence, and sticking around, and…

“I’m not going to say this has nothing to do with my father, because it is to do with him,” Chris says when Melissa lifts her head. He pauses, his other hand up in the air between them, and then drops that to his knee and exhales hard at the same time. “I want to be better than him. He helped fuck up your life—yours and Scott’s and a whole bunch of other people who tried to get back their pound of flesh before you ever came to town. And you know, the first few, I tried to just say that was him and not me and it shouldn’t be on me, but—nobody listens to that. It doesn’t even matter what I think, it just doesn’t _work_. So I want to help, because it’s not what my father would’ve done, and because I think it’ll work better at protecting my family, and if you can’t—even if you can’t believe that—”

“You can take the help, can’t you? It doesn’t cost you anything,” Victoria says.

“Well, I think that’s the problem,” Melissa says. She sounds terrible, like somebody’s crumpled up her voicebox. She swallows and tries again. “I…should. Yeah, I should. I should do _anything_ it takes to make sure Scott has a different life, but I just—I said I wouldn’t be like Rafael, I said that when I kicked him out and now I’m just—you don’t know what happens when you’ve done what I’ve done. And you’re just asking me to do even more of that.”

Victoria starts to say something, then looks at Chris. He presses his lips together, and then his eyes narrow. “We’re not asking you to _take advantage_ of us,” he says. “We’re still looking out for our family, too. But just…offering a little help.”

“A little,” Melissa says, shaking her head. “Sure, I’ve heard that before. That’s what John said, and now his wife’s dead and Stiles—Stiles is _way_ too like me about things.”

“Fine, more than a little,” Chris says. He runs his hand through his hair, then rubs it down the side of his neck and onto his shoulder; he still hasn’t put on a shirt. “But I’m not doing this because I think it’ll get me killed. _Vic_ wouldn’t let me do it if she thought we’d get killed.”

“So maybe you’re both idiots,” Melissa says.

Chris gives her a flat, unimpressed stare. “I think you just don’t want us to like you.”

Melissa sucks her breath. For a moment she thinks she’s going to start laughing again, and then all of the air seems to disappear and she just slumps against the wall, looking at them. “Why _do_ you? You do—I can smell it. Werewolves can do that.”

A flush creeps up Chris’ throat. He lets out an awkward tongue-click noise and looks at Victoria, and then visibly pulls himself back to meet Melissa’s eyes. “Well, I get it. I know we don’t know you that well, but I could tell how much you wanted to protect Scott, and doing anything—I get that. And you do that—really well. No, really, I’ve been in some fights and…”

“He does like that sort of thing,” Victoria says dryly, when Melissa looks at her to see how she’s taking it. She shrugs and then pushes herself up and resettles herself to take weight off her bandaged leg, and both of her breasts swing free of her blouse, which is so soaked it’s hanging below her bra. “I appreciate it too. And I appreciate that even if you think you’re losing your mind, you’re still _trying_ not to.”

Victoria doesn’t blush. Melissa stares at her for a good thirty seconds and there isn’t a single speck of color in her cheeks—but her pulse is racing.

“I still think you’re idiots,” Melissa finally says. She sits back and watches it sink into them—her lack of movement as well as what she’s saying—and then she pushes herself up onto one knee, turning towards the door.

Then she’s on Chris, straddling him and pinning his arms back over his head. He huffs out a breath, pure reflex as his back hits the floor, and then he realizes what’s happened and gasps. Middle of that, Victoria makes a move and Melissa whips around and grabs her wrist. The less injured arm, but still, she’s using it to twist Victoria up against the sink cabinet. Just long enough to make her point, and then she sits back and puts her hands on her thighs.

“Look,” she says, as Chris and Victoria pant and stare at her. “Do you understand—do you see that I can _kill_ you?”

“Chris,” Victoria says, over what Chris tries to say. 

She looks at Melissa. Her eyes are still widened from shock, but they’re lucid, and when she moves, she moves with a purpose in mind. Leaning down, rolling slightly to avoid her bad leg, her hands sliding onto Chris’ chest and then along his throat to cup his face. He sucks in a long breath, eyes flicking from Melissa to her to Melissa, and then he closes them and stretches up his chin as they kiss.

It’s a deep, leisurely one, familiarity without contempt, as if this is just picking up a long-running thread. Chris lifts his head and his arm wraps around Victoria’s hip, then comes up to help as Victoria, the more impatient one, starts tugging at her underwear. Under the clothes, once the tan peters out, Chris is almost as pale as she is. Next to them, the tops of Melissa’s feet are shockingly dark.

The kiss ends, and Victoria arches a little against Chris as she pushes herself off him and turns to Melissa. “Point being, you’re not afraid of me?” Melissa says.

“Point being—” Victoria’s breathless and makes it sound like a victory, at first, before she really settles in front of Melissa “—fear isn’t how we’re making this decision.”

“Are you making it? I don’t get a say?” Melissa says.

She’s just being difficult, because—because God, but that looked good just now and she wants it, with a sudden, visceral need that she thought she’d grown out of, and she should say why she can’t have it but she also can’t bring herself to, and she’d thought she’d killed that too. Victoria moves forward and Melissa tenses, getting off Chris and bringing her knees up in front of her.

 _I know you’re being difficult_ , says Victoria’s eyes, but she just stops where she is. Glances at Melissa’s knees, then lifts her hands, slow and careful, and lays them over the kneecaps. “So what are you saying?” Victoria asks.

Melissa bites her lip. She tries looking down, but Victoria’s taller than her even sitting, and that just means she’s looking at the woman’s long, elegant throat, with the slight flutter of the pulse in the side. She looks up again and Victoria’s staring her down, just—just like another alpha, she thinks. Her lip curls a little and Victoria sees that—smells suddenly worried, her fingers trembling against Melissa’s knees. Stays put, but it’s a different kind of stare she’s giving Melissa now. Not untouchable. Human, Melissa thinks.

She reaches up and touches the sides of Victoria’s bra. The other woman shivers, and lets go of one knee to drop her arm out of her blouse. She starts to do the same with the other side, but stops when Melissa pushes her fingertips into the top of her bra. Her lip catches between her teeth, and then she inhales sharply as Melissa tugs her bra cups down and then thumbs her nipples.

“I don’t know,” Melissa says. She rolls up, so that their heads are leveled, and then swings one arm around Victoria’s neck and drags their mouths together.

Victoria groans into it, hands coming up to pull at Melissa’s arms. Not to get away, to press forward. She twists Melissa’s bra off, then moves over as her own snaps past them, the elastic strap grazing Melissa’s arm—Melissa looks past her and sees Chris with one hand on Victoria’s back. His eyes are dark but he’s not touching other than that, and God, they’re so _nice_ , Melissa thinks. 

She bites Victoria’s lower lip, hard. Victoria shudders and rubs her breasts against Melissa, then slumps her chin to Melissa’s shoulder as Melissa hooks a finger through Chris’s beltloop, hauls him in. He looks surprised, then thoughtful, and then he dips a second before she reaches for his head.

Chris lets her drag her fingers through his hair and pants and noses right into the vee of her legs, using his hands to help support her thighs as she cants towards his mouth. He doesn’t waste any damn time, she thinks, abruptly unmoored, scrabbling at Victoria for balance. Then she feels the other woman wince at her grip and _this is what you get with who I am_ but when Melissa pushes her forearm against Victoria’s side, Victoria swings back to her mouth, just as eager as before. More eager, sinking down between Melissa’s knees right next to Chris, their limbs tangling together as they lick and suck over Melissa’s skin, heads bumping up against her palms.

Melissa sees the world jar, and then feels the thump of the wall against the back of her head. It hurts, but it’s almost another person who feels that, someone standing off from the frantic action between her legs, the mounting hot pressure in her belly. Someone who isn’t snarling at the ceiling, fingers twisted in blond and red hair, rocking forward so that one of them gasps, probably can’t breathe enough and she doesn’t even _care_ , she just wants them to goddamn finish what they _started_ because they _did_ start it, they started it, they started it and it’s not her fault and it’s not her not her not

her

_ah _says something deep and low-voiced inside of Melissa, something that’s been twisted up so hard that she hadn’t even realized it was that way. That she’d just thought should be that way, until now when it unwinds with such a hard snap that it leaves her dazed for minutes. She’d forgotten, she thinks.__

__Things stir under her hands, then slide away. She’s aware of soft, uneven noises, the slight silk-sand susurration of skin sliding against skin, and then a grunt makes her jerk. She blinks and looks down, and Chris stops where he is, fully naked now, one hand on Victoria’s hip, half-rolled on top of the other woman with his pelvis angled down but not quite flush with her. Victoria’s looking up too, her hands half-twisted as she’s about to push herself up. She presses her lips together, then bites the bottom one, which is swollen and tender already, and then she turns her wrists so her hands are palms-up, offering them as Melissa pushes herself off the wall and puts a hand to Chris’ shoulder and shoves him over._ _

__He grunts again, eyes wide as Melissa climbs onto him, holds down his elbows. She kneels over his erect cock, lets its head just brush at her and he twitches up, then groans and arches his head back as she tightens his grip. She rocks back and forth, mixing her wetness with the precum she can feel on his cock head, and watches the way he twists under her._ _

__A sharp-caught breath makes her turn. Victoria is staring at her husband, but as if sensing it, she looks up at Melissa and finally, beautifully, the woman is coloring. Hot, heated red, all over her face and throat and down onto the swell of her breasts, and when Melissa smiles at her, showing teeth, Victoria shivers all over as if the smile had run its edges down the front of her body._ _

__Then Victoria’s crawling over, wrapping herself around Chris’ side, grabbing onto his shoulder as Melissa slips one hand between her legs, a finger into her. Her thighs close up when Melissa slides her thumb across her clit, and then hike up roughly when Melissa presses down, same time Chris gasps wordlessly for air, bowing up when Melissa abruptly sinks down his cock._ _

__Neither of them take that long to come, they’re so keyed up for it. And Melissa can just watch the mess they make, her head clear now, her eyes focused. She can, and does._ _

__“I do like you,” she tells them afterwards. Still watching them, even though she’s climbed off and they’re still lying on the floor, their pulses nowhere near resting. She pulls one knee up to rest her chin on it._ _

__“That’s the problem?” Victoria says. She rolls over onto one arm, still breathless, but leveling her stare at Melissa._ _

__“I don’t…” Melissa shrugs. She pulls her hair back from her face; it’s a sweaty, limp mess and she probably should take another shower. Instead she just pulls the towel from the rack on the wall—one of them, Chris, probably, must have replaced it—and gives her legs and crotch a half-hearted rub with it. “The werewolf thing makes it…tricky.”_ _

__Chris pushes himself up on his elbows, pauses for breath, and then pulls into a sitting position. “The werewolf thing or your ex-husband?” he asks._ _

__“They’re kind of the same thing. He’s been a problem as long as I’ve been a werewolf and I just…” Melissa closes her eyes for a second “…I need to know he’s dead. Really dead. And—and maybe, okay, you can help with that. But…do you even—have you even thought about what you’re going to have to know? What you’re going to see? If you thought Gerard needed to be kicked out—”_ _

__“I thought that because he didn’t actually put any weight on family, and it was pretty clear we were just bargaining chips, and not just because he hurt us,” Chris says. He runs one hand over his eyes, smoothing away some of the sweat, then looks back at her. “Look…what exactly you meant by us not knowing everything you’ve done with Allison, I’m going to—we’re going to talk about that later. We’re going to want to know. This isn’t some—we’re not ignoring anything. I watched you kill somebody in front of me, and I was impressed but I’m not—killing isn’t a fetish of mine. And I—I’ve seen people die before but I’ve never been the one doing it.”_ _

__“So you talking yourself out of this?” Melissa says._ _

__The way Chris straightens up, all offended, both charms her and makes her wince. “What—no. I know I’m not really being that clear right now but—”_ _

__“The point is, are you afraid to see what we think? Afraid we might _not_ leave you alone?” Victoria says._ _

__And then the woman tenses up when Melissa looks at her. So worried about how this might go, even though she doesn’t hesitate to go there. “I…” Melissa says, and then sighs._ _

__She fingers the towel in her lap, then pushes it off her. It ends up by Victoria, though Melissa hadn’t been trying to do that. Victoria still seems to think it was deliberate, and gives Melissa a nod as she picks it up and starts cleaning herself off with an unused corner._ _

__“You can sleep on it,” Victoria says. Her shoulders hitch, and then Melissa realizes the woman’s being rueful. It’s an odd look on her, makes her younger. “You don’t need to figure it out now—that’d be a little irresponsible of us.”_ _

__“Yeah, you’re—you just got out of another insane fight, you probably just want to rest up,” Chris says, suddenly smelling chagrined. He twists around and peeks out into the hall. “And we’re just talking you to death, on top of, well—”_ _

__“Well, it’s not exactly how we heal, but I think I’m all right,” Melissa says, unable to help being amused. She and Chris get up at the same time, and then she puts her hand out when he winces and jerks to a stop; the adrenaline’s clearly not immunizing him from his bruises anymore. “I do need a nap.”_ _

__“Okay,” Chris grunts. He straightens up more slowly. “I’ll get you a towel and then we’ll go—”_ _

__“Where, exactly? Your house?” Melissa says. “Did Stiles or anyone tell you if we’d figured out what happened back in the morgue? Because if not—”_ _

__Victoria’s trying to get up now too. “No, they’re still working on it, and they did explain we probably should stay here because of the magical…protections till they do. But we can go to another room.”_ _

__“I’m not sure about that,” Melissa says, eyeing Chris. She’s drawing on his pain a little, enough to help him limber up but hopefully not enough for him to notice._ _

__Although maybe that’s not working, with how sharply he looks at her. “Well, if you want, we can stay up here,” he says after a moment. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”_ _

__It takes a moment for her to understand. “You’re going to, what, watch out for me?”_ _

__“I realize we’re still clueless, but as far as I can tell, the supernatural’s not that subtle when it’s trying to kill you and at the least, we can yell for the rest of the house,” Chris says stiffly._ _

__His pride’s starting to get touchy again, because he just—thinks—Melissa doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream at him. She just…_ _

__“Well, just sit on the bed then,” she tells them. “Honestly, it hurts to watch you right now.”_ _

__Victoria tilts her head and Melissa hears the words that just came out of her mouth, and—they are so very, very right. And yet…_ _

__She can’t keep doing what she’s been doing, she thinks. That doesn’t save anybody from getting hurt either—Scott, her son, she doesn’t even know how badly she’s done by him, except that she has. She has to change that. She _will_ change that._ _

__She can’t give up. She can’t help that; maybe she should, but she can’t. It’s just not how she is. And if she’s going to fix this…maybe other people. Maybe, she thinks, try them. If it helps her, helps Scott, it’ll be worth it. But if this just ends up making things worse, with more bodies on her hands, and—she can’t figure this out right now. She just can’t._ _

__“If that’s what you want,” Victoria says._ _

__Melissa doesn’t trust herself to answer. She nods, and after a moment, Chris and Victoria follow her out of the room. And sit on the bed. Opposite corners, one facing the windows and the other the door._ _

__Too tired for this, Melissa thinks, flopping over on her side. She’s going to just snap something and then leave it, but sleep gets in the way._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Being bitten and turning seems to be a pretty violent experience, even for the ones who survive. I've theorized before that it could potentially cause miscarriage. On the other hand, if a pregnant woman was bitten and survived, given that the werewolf condition seems to involve major physiological changes, it seems like the child would also be affected (applying logic to fantastical conditions, hah). Anyway, Scott was born a werewolf, but not an alpha.
> 
> Stiles also was born a werewolf in this world, but John and Claudia totally planned that and both of them were on board (Claudia was a werewolf first, bit John, and then they made a baby).


	6. Chapter 6

“You that mad at me?” John says.

Melissa stares up at his upside-down face. She’s sprawled with her head towards the foot of the bed, and has bodies lying on top of her. Chris is pillowing his head into the left in-curve of her waist, while Victoria is lying on her stomach with her head nestling up against Melissa’s right armpit. They both sleep very quietly, she notes. 

“I kept Talia at work,” John adds.

“Well, she _is_ work, or so you’ve told me,” Melissa mutters. She considers her situation, then twists towards Chris, bends one knee, and carefully shimmies off the end of the bed. “So where are we?”

John hands her a set of clothes and then stands back to check something on his phone. He’s out of uniform again, though she can see his sheriff’s jacket thrown over the chair in the corner. “Two bras, and one’s the emergency one.”

“Damn it,” Melissa says, in the middle of hooking her bra-strap. She finishes that and throws on the shirt, and is tugging on the jeans when Chris abruptly flips over. He starts to say something to her, notices John, freezes for a second and then tosses part of the blanket over Victoria before rumpling more over his lower half. “Okay, and?”

“And Rafael’s dead,” John says.

He gives her time to sit down on the edge of the bed. And to realize her pants are still only halfway up her thighs, and sit up and pull them the rest of the way and do up the fly and just stare at him. He gets it, says the exhausted way he stares back, no matter how deadpan he sounds.

“That file you found, with the spellwork on the last few pages,” John finally goes on. “Stiles looked it up and it’s a spell to keep people away from a grave. That kanima got set up to make sure nobody dug Rafael back up, we figure.”

“Where,” Melissa finally manages. She’s distantly aware that Victoria’s woken up too, and is a little too close to her back. She doesn’t like it when people hover and that’s what it is, she doesn’t even need to sniff for the sympathy, but the most she can work up to is just not turning around. “I mean the grave—”

“I don’t know,” John says, and then he frowns and turns around. “Stiles was still working out all of the…details…what the hell…”

Talia Hale is storming through the house, arguing with her son. Something about irresponsible and not letting her know and it’s no excuse that Stiles didn’t tell him something when he should’ve at least told her they’d left. Melissa and John share a look and then he moves towards the door while she pushes off the bed.

“Oh, don’t even try,” Talia says the moment she walks into the room. “Don’t give me your werewolf bullshit right now when you all ran off to the hospital and _left Peter alone_.”

“What did he do?” Chris asks.

“What did he—” Talia comes so close to lunging that Melissa’s got her claws out when the other woman pulls back “—what did _he_ do? What did he do when he’s gone and I can’t get hold of him and all I have is a voicemail of him _not sounding like him and saying he’s going out of town_? What did you do, you useless moonstruck jackasses?”

“Mom, he’s the one who said he wanted to keep looking in the boxes—wait, voicemail?” Derek says from the doorway. Then his head twists around to face the hall. “Oh, what do you—”

Stiles comes in, looking pale and holding a familiar piece of paper. “Wait—didn’t sound like him?”

“Didn’t sound like him. I know him and that wasn’t Peter. Either it was a very good imitation of his voice, or somebody was making him say that,” Talia says, spinning on her heel. She looks at Stiles, then whips on John. “You said you’d gotten rid of all the other werewolves—”

“It’s not—no, it’s not Blackwood,” Stiles breaks back in. He’s looking down at the paper, getting paler by the second as he rubs at the side of his head. “It’s—oh, shit, I missed this line, it’s—”

“Scott!” comes a scream from the other end of the house.

Melissa’s out the door and down the hall in Stiles’ bedroom before the scream dies out. Allison stares wildly at her, then jabs her finger at the open window. “He just—he got a call and he just jumped out—”

“Wait, wait—Melissa—wait, it’s—Melissa, we broke the seal, the kanima was the seal, Rafael’s—it’s him—” Stiles is shouting behind Melissa.

She’s at the window. A dark figure is streaking away from the house. Melissa gets up on and over the windowsill, and hits the ground mid-stride, going after her son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliffhanger, I know. The next installment is already written, I just need to give it a final read-through.


End file.
